


You Made a Monster Out of Me

by basicallymonsters



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Canon-Typical Violence, Drummer Andrew, M/M, Mutual Pining, Oblivious Neil Josten, Slow Burn, Substance Abuse, Tattoos, Vocalist Neil, canon adjacent but absolutely different actually, we're trying to untangle neil's feelings from day one y'all settle in, yo I'm just transplanting these characters from one apparently low stakes circumstance to another
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-04
Updated: 2019-07-18
Packaged: 2019-07-25 01:10:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 59,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16186949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/basicallymonsters/pseuds/basicallymonsters
Summary: He realizes that everyone feels exactly the same way he does, filthy and buzzed and understood and angry. His eyes find Andrew again, sober but animated like the drums are a live wire and he’s electric.He thinks, if he could be part of this, if he could stand in the middle of the stage in a garden full of monsters, and sing the audience’s veins open, he would never need another drink, or another moment on court.Prompt: Andreil in a rock band setting – tattoos, harsh lighting, calloused fingers, Andrew’s sweaty arms, Neil’s striking blue eyes, someone’s excellent voice, an uncomfortable undercurrent of drug abuse.





	1. Chapter 1

Neil meets the monsters two years after he sinks his mother’s bones into the sea, when his life is finally drooping in its stranglehold.

They roll onto the stage like a thundercloud, like a giant turning in its sleep, and they don’t banter before they play, they drink with one hand and play with the other. The drummer taps on the bass drum pedal constantly, an unerring heartbeat. His blond hair is green under the stage lights. 

There are two mediocre guitarists and a wicked bass player with the fingers taped up on his left hand, and they pass the vocal line between everyone like they’re trying to find its rightful owner. They handle the melody like its hurting them.

When Neil peers up at them from rock bottom, hands searching strangers’ pockets and mind jammed at the foot of the stage, he feels like he’s seen them before.

He had graduated from Millport and never showed up to collect his diploma, walked out into the stadium and practiced on his own until his hands chapped bloody and the rainwater ate through his t-shirt. He’d bared his teeth at the dark open goal and known he’d never play again.

He started to split between states and people, surfacing for air less and less. He didn’t have school or exy anymore so he started looking for something else to distract him. 

He bleached his hair raw and pierced his septum and painted his face into different shapes and felt the farthest away from his father that he’d ever felt. Everything was easy and blind in the bathrooms of clubs and in the middle of storms of smoke and ghoulish bleached light in parking lots.

When he stopped following his mother’s rules and still went un-caught, his old fear pulled away from his bones. He stopped feeling like he belonged to anything at all. He ripped away the armour his mother had put on him, her nails pricking his chin to force it up, sanding his edges off so that he was smooth and mangled and disguised in blood and war paint.

He stops running and starts feeling like the bleary, shimmering heat a jet leaves behind, like he’s had a fever for as long as he can remember but his pulse is too tired to race. 

He starts to fight through bars, a dark, uneasy hangover of a presence, stealing tips and wallets and the expensive equipment that they leave on stage between sets. His disguise is self-made now, but he doesn’t trust his own hands. He doesn’t trust his voice and the ugly things it can do.

The MC introduces a band called Ausreißer and butchers their name into pieces. They’re opening for some shitty indie rock solo artist, and they’re so loud and so good for an opener that Neil stops moving, one ear towards the stage, fingers clenched in the cash in his jacket pockets. They slash through a set of eery instrumentals and fast-paced lyrics, and the air blisters. It’s almost rap, percussive and impersonal in the mouth of the bassist and the grinning, glowing drummer.

Neil catches his eye, dark and blown apart, and the drummer winks, so over the top that it makes Neil’s stomach sink, though he can’t pin down why.

He makes himself turn around and move through the crowd, heavier this time, somehow guiltier for stopping and listening than for stealing and lying.

He tucks his head down and smiles at the waitress so that she smiles instinctively before she slides back into indifference. He’s polite like a performer, not charming so much as he is slick and insubstantial, one of many nodding strangers in a house of mirrors crowd.

He starts to move quickly like a hassled stage manager as soon as he’s close to the front of the throng, shouldering easily through the plain black door beyond the stage where the opening band is performing. He finds a makeshift backstage in the hallway, full of beer bottles and open guitar cases, a scribbled set list sitting on top of some jackets.

He passes them by, looking for storage rooms or dressing rooms, anything with expensive booze or instruments. Sometimes he doesn’t find anything at all back here in the lush horizon between art and debauchery, but it’s so laughably easy to look. Back rooms and storage and cases and kitchens, topped up with pills and folds of bills and secrets on tap.

He catches the telltale glint of a bottle out of the corner of his eye, its sleek neck sticking out of a jacket sleeve. Neil stoops to fish it out, fingers sliding against cool, veined leather, and he finds a single malt whiskey, mostly full. He could top it up with water and sell it in the parking lot, it wouldn’t even take finesse.

He starts to stand up, but something hits him hard in the gut, with the discordant church-bell clang of a guitar being struck. He sprawls back into crinkling coats and sharp edges, and looks up, disbelieving, at the drummer from before, a guitar held at his side like a smoking gun.

Now that he’s paying attention he can hear that music isn’t wading in under the doors anymore, and the drumming heartbeat has stopped poking holes in the walls. He holds his own chest, winded and bruising.

“What is your  _problem_?”

“Thought I smelled a thief,” the drummer says. Neil can tell that his pupils are wide open even in the thin, yellow overhead light.

Neil makes a split second decision, and tightens his grip on the bottle, loosens his grip on everything else. “There was no lock on the door,” he slurs, affecting the righteous certainty of the wasted. “And I found this.”

The guy makes a sound like a buzzer and says, “you think you’re entitled to something because the door is unlocked? Try again.”

Neil pushes up onto his hands but the drummer jams the headstock of the guitar between his ribs, with the steady pressure and precision of a scalpel.

“I don’t think I’m the one who owes someone an explanation,” Neil says viciously, dropping the act, “when you’re assaulting me with a stringed instrument.”

The drummer cocks his head, looking amused. “You take something from me, your wrist gets slapped.” He pulls the guitar back and slams the headstock home in Neil’s gut, nearly hard enough to break skin. He sputters, grabbing the neck in an attempt to ease up some of the pressure. The drummer only twists it deeper, then drops into a crouch. “If you lie to me about it, maybe I break the bottle over your head.”

“You’re deranged,” Neil says. Up close, he can see a slender tattoo of a hydra winding up his neck, a crop of dark snakes forking out of his collar, fangs bared towards his ear. It suits him, deadly, simple lines, impossible to ignore.

He makes a reproving sound, tossing the guitar noisily aside and reaching for the whiskey instead. Neil seizes the opportunity and swings his arm up hard, aiming to crack the bottle against his skull, but his wrist gets caught up in the snare of the drummer’s grip, un-slippable as a sailor’s knot.

“Uh oh,” he says. “He’s a fighter  _and_  a liar. That’s interesting.”

“Let go of me.” He’s overwhelmed by the guy’s knee tipping against his sternum, the blown-open, curious look on his face, the sweat streaking down his neck. The inked hydra is so close to Neil’s face that he could get tangled in its coils.

That stomach-sinking feeling resurfaces, like the drummer poached him back onstage and now he’s reeling him in.

“Or what?”

“Andrew,” a voice thunders, and Neil cuts a look to the open doorway, where the bass player is moving towards them with the fast, loping gate of a predator. “ _Get off_.”

The drummer—Andrew—throws a look behind him and laughs. “Couldn’t finish the set without me? Boo hoo.”

“Andrew,” the bassist repeats, irritated. Neil tries to twist his arms out or kick himself free, but everything gets tighter and heavier the harder he fights. The familiar, trapped sensation sends his heart into hysterical cartwheels.

“Kevin,” Andrew says back, mocking. He rides the wave of Neil’s thrashing body like he doesn’t even notice it.

“If you get into another fight, I’m not responsible for how fucked up your hands get.”

“Oh except you are,” Andrew says, playing exaggeratedly at wide-eyed respect. “Such a responsible team captain.”

Kevin looks furious, but his eyes catch on Neil for the first time, and his jaw clenches. “You. What were you doing?”

“I got lost,” Neil says, “and he attacked me with a guitar.”

“Liar,” Andrew sing-songs. Kevin rolls his eyes and grabs at the liquor bottle, shaking it in Neil’s grip.

“Tell me this isn’t a dispute over some whiskey.”

“Okay,” Andrew says. “I won’t tell you.”

“You’re a piece of shit,” Kevin says. “So are you,” he tells Neil, looking imperiously down on him. He gets up and walks back down the hallway towards the bar, fists clenching, fingers straining against the tape that’s holding them together.

“I don’t think he liked you,” Andrew muses.

“Let me go,” Neil repeats. Andrew looks down at him like he forgot he was still trussed up by his hands.

“What will you give me?”

“I don’t have anything,” Neil says, squirming. “I’m broke.” Stolen money is heavy in his pockets.

“What would I do with your money?” Andrew peels the whiskey out of Neil’s hand.

“Traditionally you spend it,” Neil says, shuffling backwards out from under him as soon as his grip lets up, grabbing onto music stands and wall sconces until he’s upright again.

“Oh, so you do understand the concept of not stealing,” he says, and Neil’s lip curls.

“Sure. I just don’t think that everyone deserves payment.”

Andrew tosses the bottle of whiskey in the air and catches it. Neil tracks its journey, mesmerized. He can’t understand why he hasn’t already made a run for it.  

“Now you’re hurting my feelings.”

“Didn’t seem like you had any,” Neil retorts. Andrew tosses the bottle again, catching it without looking. Neil’s eyes slip slide over the armbands rucked up to his elbows, the sleeve of earrings climbing his ear, the blond, sweaty hair that he doesn’t seem to care is splashed into his eyes.

“How did you like our set?” he asks abruptly, and when Neil’s distracted gaze finds Andrew’s, it’s fixed, scrutinizing.

He considers the way the music made his veins into soup, the triumph on Andrew’s face when he hit the snare loud enough to break its skin.

“It was unbelievable,” he says honestly, breathless, like his voice has a puncture wound and everything’s deflating. Andrew’s face doesn’t change, but his grip changes on the bottle.

“You’re hired,” he says. The lights buzz. Neil kneads the place where his wrists were pinched, and tries to understand what he’s hearing.

“What?”

“I’m bored, and you’re in the band.” He shoots Neil a challenging look, corner of his mouth hooked upwards. He has this weird way of making all of his expressions look like that plastic packaging, the kind that you need scissors to cut off.

“I just tried to steal from you. I was going to hit you with that bottle, and I was going to leave whether it pissed you off or cracked your skull open,” Neil says. The honesty is confused, and it burns his mouth on the way out.

Andrew looks at the ceiling while he unscrews the cap on his whiskey. “If you keep telling me obvious things, I will be less interested in you.”

Neil stares at the line of his throat as he gulps liquor like water. “I don’t play any instruments.”

“I don’t care,” he says, wiping his mouth.

“I don’t know you.”

Outside, the headliner starts playing riffs that crackle and spit like a campfire. It’s nothing like the singular sound of Ausreißer, like someone threw a drum kit into a cyclone.

“I don’t care,” Andrew repeats, voice glinting like gun metal. He drops the bottle of whiskey clumsily to the floor, and the last two inches in the bottom seep out onto the laminate. Neil looks blankly down at it, and wonders what would’ve happened if he hadn’t been caught, if Andrew even would’ve noticed that the booze was missing.

Something wrenches in his chest when he thinks of what it might be like to agree. He hasn’t had anywhere fixed to go in so long, he just floats in the same direction as the last person he robbed, or kissed, or smoked with.

He drags his mother’s corpse wherever he goes, and stays so far under the radar that it’s not living, exactly, it’s a duffle bag, a high that never stops, and a hurt in his hands when he thinks about how racquets and knife-handles felt in them.

He thinks of the way he felt when he looked up to see Ausreißer playing the stage, the way the music got to the bottom of a well inside of him and brought up fresh water.

“I’m pretty sure the “runaways” is already a band,” Neil tells him, and Andrew looks up at him, surprised or impressed.

“Ausreißer also means outlier,” he replies.

“And stray bullet,” Neil says reflexively.

“You know German,” Andrew says. Neil nods slowly. “How convenient.” They stare at each other, and Andrew grins like he’s filling the space, the emotional dead zone where Neil is false and Andrew is passive. “You should meet my dear family.”

Neil’s brow furrows.

Andrew walks to the end of the hallway where the crowd is shouting and the artist is tripping around lyrics like he’s trying to wrestle them into dancing with him. Andrew holds the door open, teeth flashing. Neil hesitates.

“What, do you have somewhere else to be?” Andrew taunts.

Neil thinks about it. The only places that have ever felt vital have been the court and the stage, where crowds overflow, music bunches up in your ears and deafens you, and the power and heat scrubs the ugly parts of you clean.

“No,” he says. “I don’t live around here.”

Andrew smiles. “Runaway,” he says accusingly, and then he turns into the restless bustle of the crowd. Neil watches the door swing, and a shiver hits him hard at the back of the neck, and swallows him up.

_______

“Oh my god. Can we keep him?” Nicky says. He’s the taller guitarist, with the curls and the frenetic hand gestures, and he holds Neil’s arms out to examine him like he’s taking his measurements.

Neil followed Andrew out into the chaos of the bar only to round his bandmates back into the room they just left, hefting equipment and putting away their instruments. He digs his duffel out of the storage space behind the bar, and compulsively pats down its contents. Andrew tucks his drumsticks into his back pocket and lights a cigarette.

“No,” Kevin says firmly. “We don’t know if he would bring anything to the band except a fifth bad attitude.”

“I won’t,” Neil admits. “I don’t know how to play anything.”

“Does that matter?” Nicky asks. “With a face like yours?” He reaches out for his cheek, but Andrew grabs his hand and cracks the fingers back. “Jesus, jesus, okay, he’s yours, fine.”

Neil frowns, not understanding Andrew’s weird, sporadic whims, protective instincts on top of mania on top of violent indifference.

“It does matter,” the other twin Aaron says. “We can’t put leashes on every stray dog we find.”

“A: that sounds great,” Nicky says, “and B: would you rather Andrew have a grudge against you for the next decade?”

“I’m already signed up for that,” Aaron says dully. He clips his guitar into its case and hefts it over his shoulder. The smoke from Andrew’s cigarette is clearing Neil’s head, and now that he’s sorted his emotions into piles, he can admit that everything’s stacked up in Ausreißer’s favour. He hasn’t stopped shivering, thrilled and stupid at the thought of travelling in a pack, taking up space, having a name that people know.

“What’s that?” Neil asks, gesturing to the inked wings wrapped around Nicky’s bicep.

He glances down, and looks up beaming. When he twists to the side, Neil can see a human face looming out of the feathers. “She’s my harpy. Only woman I’ll ever love,” he says wistfully.

“You all have creatures from myths?” he asks, spotting a minotaur on the back of Kevin’s neck when he leans over to wind the cord around one of their amps, and a Sphinx peering out from Aaron’s forearm.

“Monsters,” Andrew corrects, flashing a smile around a peal of smoke.

“Some of our fans call us the monsters,” Nicky tells him conspiratorially. “It’s easier to say than Ausreißer, I guess.” He rolls his eyes.

“And you’re related?” Neil asks slowly, glancing between Nicky and the twins.

Nicky laughs. “Scout’s honour. I wouldn’t lie about sharing blood with these gremlins. Mexican mother,” he says, jerking a thumb at himself, “terrible mother,” he finishes, cranking it in Aaron and Andrew’s direction.

Andrew laughs. “Oh, Nicky. Your mother is no better.”

“Enough,” Kevin says, long-suffering. “Neil, right?” he asks, and Neil nods. “Have you ever taken a music class? Can you even read music?”

Neil shrugs. “I guess I used to take piano lessons. It wasn’t hard.”

Kevin scoffs.

“Can you sing?” Nicky asks.

“Oh,” Neil says. “Yeah.”

“Yeah?” Nicky repeats. He looks excitedly at Kevin, who looks at Andrew.

Andrew steps forward, holding his cigarette at his side, eyes narrowed. “Prove it.”

“Right now?”

“This is your audition,” Andrew says. “Wow me.”

“You said you didn’t care if I had talent,” Neil says accusingly. The smoke is too much for him to handle, he keeps getting flashes of the sheets of his mother’s hair, the hotel rooms that were so hot that the walls seemed to sweat, Andrew’s dark, serious eyes stirred in with everything else.

“I said I didn’t care if you could play an instrument,” Andrew corrects. “If you can sing, then you’re more than just interesting. You’re useful.”

“Fine,” Neil says. He calls up the most recent song he can remember singing, in the showers in high school, after all the lights were off and the doors were locked at the end of the day.

Now that he’s about to sing he realizes how deeply he’s missed it, how he cut all of his talents at the root so that they wouldn’t get too loud, and how he felt so raw and wounded for so long.

He sinks into this slow-building rock ballad, a thing with tricky intervals and stony belting that turns into breath on a dime. His voice sounds a little weaker than it used to, watered down from lack of practice. It glides over some of the notes like it’s afraid to touch them.

He doesn’t look at anyone, and he focuses on his posture, the dizzying cycles of his breath. He remembers his piano teacher hitting the small of his back until he straightened his spine, his coach teaching him how to push through the wheezing in his empty lungs.

He realizes he’s starting to smile when his vowels start flattening out. He feels like his mouth has been taped shut for years, and music was welling up behind his teeth like blood. He finishes the song, heart pounding, head light, and then there are hands on his shoulders.

“You’re a fucking superstar, you know that right?” Nicky says, shaking him.

“That was good,” Aaron says reluctantly.

“I hope the tone can be ironed out in practice,” Kevin says. His shoulders look lighter, relieved. “But you have some potential.”

Neil looks at Andrew and finds him quiet and steaming somehow, like a hot kettle you can tell is about to boil. “Bravo,” he says. “You can sing.”

“Is that it?” Neil asks, wilting. “Did I wow you or not?”

“It is difficult to wow me,” Andrew says, looking away. Neil can’t figure out why he’s so disappointed by his apathy.

“So he’s in?” Nicky asks, excited. One of his hands is still gripping Neil’s shoulder.

“We’ll have to ask Wymack,” Kevin says, hesitating.

“Are you kidding me, he loves strays. He’ll sign him in a minute.”

Andrew mouths ‘manager’ at Neil behind Kevin’s back.

“He’s right,” Aaron says. “Unfortunately.”

“Outstanding,” Andrew says. “Let’s get drunk.”

Nicky cheers, wrestling a flask free from the outside pocket of his fabric guitar case. He cocks it towards Neil. “Better get used to sharing.”

Neil accepts the flask and swallows a mouthful of something so acrid that it can only be vodka. The shot settles on top of his hours-old buzz, and his pulse spikes so violently that he can hear it. The twins pile ahead, down the long hallway towards the exit, and Kevin rounds out the rear, shouldering most of their gear.

“Hey Neil,” Nicky whispers, catching his arm when he tries to follow. “It’s important that you know that Andrew’s not usually like that.”

He swallows a couple of times, trying to get rid of the taste in his mouth. “Like what?”

“Like… off the walls like that,” he says. “Sometimes he pops pills before the show.”

“Okay,” Neil says. Andrew and Aaron disappear out the door, and Neil cranes his neck, antsy to join them. “I don’t see the point of you telling me this.”

“He’s not going to be the same Andrew tomorrow, Neil, and I need you to get that. Because if you hurt him, he’ll hurt you back, and I’ll let him.” Nicky’s eyes are so fixed and serious that Neil does a double take.

“How could I hurt him?”

“Oh, we’re gonna pretend like that’s not how it is? Okay,” Nicky says, hiking his guitar up where its slipping off his shoulder, fiddling with the silver cap on his flask with his other hand.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Um. He just picked you up in a bar and invited you into his band?”

“And?”

Nicky holds his forehead. “Oh my god.”

“What?” Neil says, feeling annoyance build beneath his skin until his knuckles go tight. Nicky seems friendly but slightly caustic, like he’s always laughing a little at whoever he’s talking to.

“Nothing, I guess,” he says, smiling. “We’re glad to have you, man, and that’s all you need to know. We’ve been looking for a more permanent vocalist for months, but no one’s been good enough for Andrew.”

Neil huffs. “Yeah, I noticed. He barely liked my voice.”

“He must’ve,” Nicky argues, “because he didn’t leave halfway through the song, and he didn’t move. Let his cigarette burn to the filter. Honestly, I’ve never seen him sit still for that long when he’s high. You’re a revelation.”

Neil tries to digest this. He feels like he’s spinning much too fast, and no matter how far he puts out his arms and digs in his heels, he can’t stop. It must be the booze.

“Oh.”

“Yeah, oh. So are you serious about this? We didn’t give you a lot of time to think about it. We move kinda fast, so you gotta keep up.” He pushes the door open, and the two of them step out into crunchy November air.

“I have nowhere else to go,” Neil says, looking ahead at the twin blond heads bobbing out into the parking lot, Kevin favouring his right hand as they pack their van with supplies.

“Then you’ll fit in,” Nicky says softly. “Last outsider we took in was Kevin, and Andrew hasn’t let up his grip on that boy in two years. Too bad for me.”

Neil watches Andrew climb up into the driver’s seat, the light from his cigarette like a little hole punched out of the dark.

“Is he okay to drive?” Neil asks. They round the van, and Nicky climbs up into the back to find a spot for his guitar.

“Babe,” Nicky says, looking up over the equipment, face swarmed by shadows. “if you’re worried about DUIs, you might as well leave now.”

Neil thinks of his mother driving a car with her knees as she sealed gauze over her own gunshot wound, and he shakes his head.

“Good. Take another shot. We’re going to be on the road for a while.”

______

He jolts awake in one of the middle seats, hand slapped to the window. His mouth is dry and his back hurts, a pinched nerve buried somewhere beneath the skin. 

The van has stopped moving, and Andrew’s sitting across the aisle from him, staring calmly at Neil’s twisted limbs and clammy brow. He’s the only other person in the vehicle, and he’s sipping a Dr Pepper and pretending that Neil isn’t staring back at him.

“We’re doing a gig in Annapolis tonight,” he tells him. Neil holds his head and tries to understand where he is and how much time has passed.

“We can’t,” he says before his brain has caught up to why. 

It’s a forty minute drive to Baltimore from Annapolis. It’s impossible to believe that he wandered so close without noticing. It’s like he fell backwards into the most choppy, twisting current he could find and it still brought him home.

His mother would have been beyond furious. His cheeks flush with phantom pain, so he turns one against the fogged up window.

“We’re going to,” Andrew says. Dead sober, Neil realizes. Whatever was in his system has toppled back out of it.

“Then I can’t come with you,” Neil says. He’s torn between fascination at Andrew’s sculpture face, and terror at where he let himself be taken, what he got caught up in. Anonymity is so easy when you’re never out of the shadows, but then Neil was stupid enough to become afraid of the dark, of what it might be doing to him.

Andrew’s head tilts so slightly. “Kevin wants trial by fire. He’ll push you on stage for a song and see what you do.”

“Aren’t there some sort of rules that say you can’t add members to your band mid-tour?”

Andrew’s eyes drift to the side, a whisper of an eye roll. “No one cares what you do.”

“Fine,” Neil says curtly. “I’ll do whatever you want. But not in Annapolis.”

Andrew gives him a calculating look. “You have secrets.”

“No more than anyone else,” Neil lies.

“Your hair is dark red,” Andrew says mildly, eyes on the whiff of roots in Neil’s blond tangle, obvious in daylight. His heartbeat trips and falls.

“You think bleach is one of my great secrets?”

“I think you are a runaway,” Andrew says, “who has forgotten how to run.”

“You don’t know me,” Neil says, disconcerted.

“No,” Andrew says. “But I’ll figure you out. Your lying is worse when you’re drunk. You left your bag unattended overnight.”

He grabs for the duffel at his feet, alarmed, but finds it exactly where he left it. Andrew’s expression is flat and unaffected even as panic tightens Neil’s throat. 

“You looked through my stuff?” he demands. Andrew says nothing, and righteous anger floods Neil’s chest, knocking things over. He does mental inventory of his most incriminating belongings, and says, “do something like that again and you’ll sincerely regret it.”

“I don’t need to. You only have so many things.”

The anger he keeps having to nail down peels up in his stomach, like old carpet with rot underneath.

“Is that why you wanted me here? I’m a puzzle for you to do on the road?” He feels for his duffle bag again, finding strength in its familiar tattered handles.

“We need a singer. You need someone to point you in a direction that isn’t down.”

Neil stares, muscling through the aftershocks of his own anger to lay hands on the most pristine thought in his head. “I can’t go to Annapolis.”

Andrew’s bored gaze slides away, out the window. “You are already here.”

Neil’s fingers go cold. His head whips around, trying to pinpoint which rest stop they’re at, who’s around, who might’ve seen a bulky black van and glanced inside.

“We just arrived.” He lifts his Dr Pepper to his lips, and Neil spots the words “yes” and “no” inked on the back of each hand. He frowns.

“So you kidnapped me.”

“You tried to steal from me,” Andrew reminds him.

“You think swiping half a bottle of whiskey and moving me three hundred kilometres overnight are equivalent offences?” He’s starting to feel claustrophobic, but when he tries the door handle it’s locked. The booze flushing out of his system is making his joints hurt and his tongue feel heavy.

“I think,” Andrew says, “that you do not have much moral high ground to stand on.”

“Andrew,” Neil says, clipped, and he gets a hazy look in response. Those dark, hooded eyes look like you could dig and dig and never get to the bottom. “Let me out of the car.”

Andrew stretches into the front seat and hits the unlock button, and Neil wrenches the door open, stumbling out into white mid-morning air, the sounds of blustering wind and swaying traffic tethering him to the steady ground beneath his feet.

His hands go to his face, where he can feel smeared foundation and grime in the corners of his eyes. He looks nothing like the last time he was in Annapolis, when he was sixteen and brunette, hormones messing with his skin and green contacts in. He had hidden under their luggage in the backseat for a while, watching the tense line of his mother’s shoulders from beneath their jackets. She’d been petrified to be so close to Baltimore, and his face, his father’s face, wasn’t allowed to be seen.

Neil’s hand goes to his side where the last gunshot he ever suffered is a pink whorl under his ribs. In the reflection from the windows of the nearby gas station, he can see Andrew leaning up against the van behind him, lighting a cigarette. The dark smell of the smoke hits him a second later, and he closes his eyes.

“Can I have one?” he asks. When he opens his eyes again, Andrew has the pack extended in his direction, and he turns to pluck one out. 

He leans closer to shield the end from the wind as he lights it, and Neil watches his light hair ruffle across his forehead.

“Smoking is bad for your voice,” Andrew tells him.

“I just like the smell.” He tucks his elbow into his side so he can prop the cigarette up by his face. The wind tries to carry the smell away, and he turns his back against it. There’s a long pause as the smoke settles into his bones, and he’s so sober he could cry, nothing but cold and memory gnawing inside of him. Then he asks, “why ‘yes’ and ‘no’?”

Andrew blows smoke at the ground, and it streams back up around his face. The more Neil looks at his neck tattoo the more it looks like it’s choking him somehow. Ornamental like a necklace is ornamental until its synched into a weapon.

At length, Andrew says, “it is a choice I was not given.”

“A choice about what?”

Andrew levels a look towards him, and Neil can see the twinge of annoyance in his eyes, something flickering like a fishtail under still water.

“You keep telling me we don’t know each other,” he drawls. “Why would you think you are entitled to that information?”

Neil shrugs. “Why would you think you’re entitled to the contents of my bag?

“I need to know who I am letting into my group. If I had found anything worth worrying about, I would have kicked you out while the van was still moving, do you understand?”

Neil takes a drag of his cigarette, half-gone, whittling quickly away in the wildness of the wind. Andrew’s hand is on his face suddenly, turning his jaw hard.

“Do you understand?”

Neil’s skin buzzes. “I understand. But I’m not scared of you.”

Andrew drops his hand. “You would be the first.”

“You’re up!” a voice calls, and when Neil follows the sound, Nicky is almost upon them, curls blown back from his face and cheeks chapped red. He’s holding three coffees in a little triangle with both hands.

“I’m up,” Neil repeats. “Kind of wish I wasn’t.”

“Not a morning person?” Nicky asks, carefully extracting a cup for Andrew, and then one for Neil. He can smell sweetness in the air, a shock of something burnt and sugary from one of the cups. He wrinkles his nose.

“Not a fan of Maryland.”

“Is anyone?” Aaron says, strolling up to the group with twin shopping bags swinging from either arm. Neil can see logos for candy and energy drinks pressed up against the plastic.

“Groceries,” Nicky says, following his gaze. “Four food groups: sour candy, caffeine, trail mix, and whatever we’ve got on hand to smoke.” He hooks a thumb in his front pocket meaningfully, grinning sideways at him. “And I just picked up a couple grams from the guy pumping gas. Didn’t even have to suck him off.”

Neil blinks.

“Nicky,” Aaron says, jamming fingers into the bridge of his nose.

“What,” he says defensively. “It’s natural.”

“Talking about it with your family and a complete stranger isn’t,” Aaron complains. Nicky tries to reach for Aaron and they squabble, hitting each other’s hands away, staggering sideways. Nicky winks exaggeratedly at Neil, ducking into Aaron’s line of vision to make sure he sees.

“I think Neil’s  _exactly_  who I should be talking to about—“

“Nicky,” Andrew says. All movement ceases. Even the air around them seems to clamp down and close its eyes. “What did we talk about?”

“Sorry,” he says hastily. “Got carried away. He’s hot. I’m only a man.”

“Do I look like I care what you are?” he asks airily. “Do not touch him.”

Neil’s eyes flicker between them, bewildered. Nicky laughs it off awkwardly, and pushes past all of them to yank the van door open.

“We should get some more sleep before dress rehearsal,” Nicky says. “Dibs on backseat.”

He climbs into the back, and Aaron sighs and hops up into the passenger seat. Kevin’s still absent, and Neil wonders if he’s off somewhere practicing, or brooding, or both.

Andrew drops his cigarette on the ground and lets it smoulder there, rolling restlessly over the cement. Neil thinks he’s going to say something in that infuriating, impenetrable voice, but he’s silent.

After a moment, he turns and follows his family inside, leveraging himself into one of the middle seats. It’s a long beat with the door hanging open and Andrew looking straight ahead before Neil realizes he’s supposed to follow.

The van feels like the safest place in Maryland, and so Neil ducks inside and rolls the door shut.

_______

The afternoon is spent lolling in the cool body of the car, Nicky’s scarf draped over his shoulders and Neil’s only hoodie pulled up to his nose. He doesn’t ask why they’re not going somewhere warmer or using the time to get Neil up to speed, because he doesn’t want to risk them deciding to move somewhere public. He curls into the strange, chilly comfort of these people that he barely knows, and warms his hands on his coffee until it’s lukewarm.

Andrew drove all night, erratic, teetering over twenty kilometres too fast, and now that he’s sleeping, he’s crossed up and dead still, the absolute antithesis of yesterday in every possible way.

The sun comes out late in the morning, and its light fills the car like warm water. Neil’s limbs thaw and unlock.

They roll up at the venue just after noon, and Neil realizes that Kevin’s been there all morning, setting up, running drills to keep his injured hand pliant enough to get the fingerings right. He greets them with set lists and prods them towards their respective instruments like he’s directing cattle. Andrew spins on the stool behind the drum kit, looking utterly disinterested.

Neil floats in front of the stage, arms folded, looking up at the people who he doesn’t quite fit with, the pattern that he’s interrupting like a skip in a record.

Kevin calls out notes to him to test his pitch, and his face pinches when Neil matches them. Nicky laughs delightedly, sliding a lazy finger over the frets of his guitar to make them whisper. He tells him that Kevin’s been practicing for a decade to imitate Neil’s naturally perfect pitch.

“He fuckin’ hates you,” Nicky crows.

Neil shrugs. “I could never play bass like him.”

“He’s the best at what he does,” Nicky nods. “Andrew too. That’s why four shitheads like us have so many fans.” He eyes Neil. “Five shitheads now, I guess.”

“No, it’s still four,” Neil says.

“Oof,” Nicky laughs. “Kitty’s got claws.”

“Pay attention,” Kevin snaps. “You have to learn the songs. We might have to transpose them to suit your range better.”

“Kevin thinks this is the fucking symphony orchestra,” Nicky stage whispers.

“I think we’re supposed to be professionals, and we should act like it,” Kevin argues.

“Do you care about bass or tenor?” Neil asks, ignoring them. Kevin hesitates.

“I write in tenor,” Andrew replies, and Neil swivels to face him.

“You write the music?”

“He’s got a good head for it,” Nicky says, and Neil didn’t think anyone could look  _fond_ of Andrew until this very moment. “Doesn’t forget shit, always knows what bar we’re on.”

“He’s good at math,” Aaron says, plucking mechanically through a riff on his guitar and pretending not to care.

“It will suit your voice,” Andrew continues. Neil watches him twirl drumsticks, hand tattoos catching the stage lights.

“It might,” Kevin says. “But you need to drill the songs until you know them in a vacuum. You’ve gotta find your way to the melody blackout drunk.” He passes a CD to Aaron, who passes it gingerly down to Neil. “Listen. Watch. I’m letting you be Andrew’s pet project but I won’t tolerate it if you slow us down.”

A flash of spite so strong it burns up to his teeth. “I think your picking game would slow you down first, leftie.”

Kevin stops frittering around on bass and his eyes zero in on Neil, green like fire. “What the fuck did you just say to me?”

“Guys,” Nicky says warningly.

“I think I said that you play bass like you’re holding one hand behind your back,” Neil says viciously, “and the other one is too busy jerking yourself off to be much help.”

Kevin wrenches the shoulder strap off and hands his bass off to Aaron. “I’ll kill you,” he spits, dropping to Neil’s level to swipe at him. Neil dodges, but Kevin just barely catches his collar, yanking him close with fistfuls of it.

Neil stumbles two steps back and takes Kevin with him, toppling off the stage so he drops almost to his knees. He only stays upright by the unerring grip on Neil’s neck.

“You’re gonna fuck up his voice,” Aaron says halfheartedly, like he wants to see how it plays out. Neil coughs and spits.

“That’s enough,” Andrew calls.

His vision is spotty, but he can see by Kevin’s quivering mouth how badly he wants to choke the life out of him. He lets go finger by finger, like he’s breaking off something that’s attached, and Neil gasps in lungfuls of stale air.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Kevin bites. Neil doesn’t trust his voice, so he glares at Kevin over the hands kneading his throat. “Rest your voice. And watch our fucking show like your life depends on it.”

“It might,” Nicky adds nervously. Kevin stalks off backstage, and Neil sits heavily into one of the chairs dragged close to the stage, feeling a headache whir to life behind his eyes.

“Might not be the best idea to provoke him right now, Neil,” Nicky says. “You’re still kind of—uh—“

“Disposable,” Aaron finishes. “We don’t need you. At all.”

“You don’t have a vocalist. At all,” Neil echoes mockingly. “And three white guys rap-singing isn’t getting you very far.”

“Touché,” Nicky says.

“It got us this far,” Aaron shrugs. “Farther than most.”

“Whatever,” Neil says. “I can leave whenever. You went through my stuff and brought me to the last place on Earth I’d want to be, so I’m not feeling very much like I owe you anything.”

“Why the large bills,” Andrew asks suddenly. Nicky and Aaron frown at each other. “The oversized clothes. The list of names.”

Neil’s shoulders curl, and his ears ring. “None of your business.”

“You made it my business,” Andrew says, “when you crouched in my belongings, and took what you could find.”

“I told you I’m broke,” Neil says through clenched teeth.

“Oh, is that all?” Andrew asks. His voice is all froth and no substance. His eyes trickle down from the ceiling he’s been staring up at all the way down to Neil, who’s looking up from below like any other fan.

And that’s what Andrew must have recognized in him, Neil realizes, his hungry ears, the way he lingered, stock still, to listen. He’s interesting enough to belong with them, but he’s also desperate enough for the taste of their music that he’d get into a stranger’s van to follow it. 

“I thought you might be a criminal.” He says it like it’s an old joke, like the idea of Neil—with the belongings of a runaway and the mouth of a bully—can only belong outside of the law where things are harder and uglier.

“Like you don’t do illegal things,” Neil says, hushed.

“I don’t care if you’ve done them,” Andrew says. “But if you keep lying to my face, it will be a problem.”

“Then we’re going to have some problems.”

Andrew’s back straightens, barely. “Tell me what it is about Annapolis.”  
  
“Tell me why you have to get high to perform,” Neil retorts. Nicky hisses.

Andrew’s face doesn’t move. “A trade?” he asks, mulling it over. “Fine. If it will keep you occupied.”

Neil looks at him expectantly. Andrew taps a cymbal so it sprays noise when he says, “it is motivational.”

“What, booze and pills make you want to work harder?”

“They make me think I want to live,” Andrew corrects, like it’s nothing, like he’s handing Neil a shiny gift and not a can of worms. “Why Annapolis?”

Neil chews over his usual lies carefully, trying to make them thin enough in places that the truth will poke through. “There are people in Baltimore who want me dead.”

Andrew considers this like he considers absolutely everything else, eyes straight ahead, half-lidded, like he didn’t hear you at all. “Why?”

“I owe them money,” Neil lies.

“For what?”

“That’s your third question,” Neil points out. “I’m not that generous.”

“I never thought you were.” They stare at each other, eyes narrowed, secrets spilling out like stuffing, caught in a stand-off. 

“Um,” Nicky starts. “As much as I love listening to you two say shit that’s fucked up beyond belief, maybe we could finish the sound check?”

Andrew doesn’t even look at him, or anyone, but he pumps the bass drum like he’s trying to bring it to life. The streak of movement when his hands join in, screaming from one side of the kit to another like he’s searching for a sound that’s never been played before, makes Neil feel like he’s been sleeping all this time, and now he’s awake.

Aaron wanders off in search of Kevin, and in the meantime, Andrew ad-libs at full speed, heaving buckets of feeling over Neil’s head and raising the hairs on his neck. He can’t imagine someone who plays like that ever wanting to die.

______

Their set is dialled up to full speed and intensity, and the water never settles for long enough that you can paddle or breathe or see through the foam. Andrew’s songs smoke the room out and the lights colour the musicians blue, catching the sweat that peppers Nicky’s hairline and slicks Andrew’s flexing arms up until the line of his armbands. 

He’s sober tonight, and some of the songs he just ticks against the snare with one hand and makes Kevin overcompensate for the gaps in percussion. But even the empty space works somehow, it breathes and makes you reach for it.

Some songs he’s brilliant, like the sparks from something that’s malfunctioning, dangerous, white hot, and raw with power. Sometimes his eyes screw shut and Neil can tell that he’s biting hard at the inside of his lip.

Aaron and Kevin lean into the same microphone, and Neil recognizes patches of the lyrics that he’s been listening to all day, twisting metaphors that don’t draw attention to themselves, feelings that he didn’t know he had and now he wishes he didn’t.

The audience jostles him, and he lets adrenaline grab him in a good way, bares his teeth and feels a distant echo of that look that Nicky had on his face when he talked about Andrew’s song-writing. The music pats him down and empties his pockets and traps him in a searchlight so exposing that he has to close his eyes against it. _I know them already_ , Neil thinks.  _They are as terrible as me_.  _They know what it is to be made wrong, and to be afraid of getting better_.

He sees a girl sawing back and forth, anguished, like the song is being torn directly from her chest. There’s a guy near the stage who is strung up between two other people, and they sway with their drinks in the air.

He realizes that everyone feels exactly the same way he does, filthy and buzzed and understood and angry. His eyes find Andrew again, sober but animated like the drums are a live wire and he’s electric.

He thinks, if he could be part of this, if he could stand in the middle of the stage in a garden full of monsters, and sing the audience’s veins open, he would never need another drink, or another moment on court.

The band plays, and he can almost only see their skill—the way they innovate lyrics and beats to wander in and out of each other—and not the people that he followed across state lines and yelled at and slept beside.

Kevin is so arrogant and scared, Nicky lightning-bright and just as erratic, Aaron prickly and difficult to handle. Andrew is the hot and cold taps turned on at once, he’s the heads that sprout from the bleeding neck of a hydra, the problem that grows and grows the longer you try to fight it.

Neil moves and listens, and like everyone else in the crowd, he thinks,  _I am one of them_.


	2. Chapter 2

The bleached hair doesn’t match his skin tone. His shirt is too big for his shoulders, and it slips to one side or the other so that he keeps having to tug the neckline up to his throat, but Andrew’s already seen the white raking down his shoulder, the scars worked into his skin like sequins and thread.

Neil reminds Andrew of the foster kids he used to live with, the hand-me-downs pulled over stunted identities, oversized cuffs dragging their feet down when they tried to run, bruises on wrists under oversized sleeves.

He can’t help the way his eyes keep skirting back to Neil, like he’s the only frequency in all the static of the crowd that’s coming through clearly.

He thought maybe if he was sober that the bubble trapped in his throat would burst, but it’s so much bigger now that he’s choking on it.

Neil is tossed back and forth with the rest of the crowd, but he stands out; there’s something in his eyes that makes them visible from the back of the stage. He glows like neon, white hair and white scars, glinting piercings in his nose and ears, stud flashing in his tongue.

Andrew throws himself at his drum-kit like it’s a punching bag, and the tempest of the crowd roars back at him. Kevin tries to skid sideways into a solo, but Andrew keeps playing, falling into a brand new tempo, a gallop that Kevin can’t keep up with. The sounds grate, sparks fly, and Andrew would be feeling it, if he were high, the discord would make him laugh and laugh.

It all sounds intentional, and Kevin’s sweating when he plays chunky chords and stinging vibrato, ad libbing his way back to the chorus. Andrew lets him do what he wants. It doesn’t feel worth it to sabotage their set. He can feel distraction setting in like winter.

When he’s at his lowest, sober and dried up, he feels sick, all stuffed up with no sense of taste. He can tell from the textures and the sense memory what the flavours are supposed to be, but he can’t feel anything.

The song ends in lyrics that Kevin yells more than sings, and Andrew smashes the cymbal a few times until it matches his heartbeat. The crowd erupts in applause, hollering so loudly that he can’t hear himself anymore. 

He looks back at Neil, like scratching an itch, and finds him grinning at the ceiling, caught up in the adrenaline and a high that Andrew can’t parse, booze or pills or euphoria.

Their eyes brush. Neil slicks his sweaty hair back with both hands and pops his tongue between his teeth, silver winking. Andrew just barely raises an eyebrow. He throws his drumsticks on the ground and they clatter between mic stands and cables as he leans forward to swipe the flask from Nicky’s back pocket. He jolts, his guitar swinging away from his body when he rounds on him.

“Thought you were staying sober tonight?” he hisses.

“Changed my mind,” Andrew says, unscrewing the flask. Their fans are laughing, heckling affectionately, shouting their support when Andrew knocks back most of the whiskey.

His stomach is empty and so are his chest and his head, so when the first shot hits his stomach, his whole body burns. He holds the back of his hand to his mouth while he waits for a buzz to take. Nicky hands him his sticks back and wrestles the flask away.

“Someone thought now was a good time to pre-game,” Nicky says into the microphone. “The good news is,” he laughs, “there’s a bar on your left, and we’re all in this together.” He raises the flask and the crowd laughs and clinks glasses.

Andrew hits the snare angrily, and it makes a sound like a startled snake.

“Listen up,” Kevin says, more strict teacher than bassist in a rock band. The houselights are wound down to nothing, and his face is hollowed out by the crossbeams of blue spotlights. “We’re gonna play a song called  _ten times faster.”_

“A song for all you lovers out there,” Nicky jokes.

“Not quite,” Aaron says, lazily retuning his guitar.

“More like, a song for when you’re tripping balls and you hit the fucking ceiling.”

“It’s about escaping,” Andrew corrects. He says it low, away from the microphone, but he could swear that Neil’s head snaps towards him; his gaze climbs up the stage and takes Andrew by the shoulders.

_He says, ‘I know what you’re after_

_we’ll do it in the dark, call it natural disaster’_

_you’re out for blood, I’ll draw it ten times faster_

_if my teeth are bared you can’t call it laughter_

_top floor, I’m too high for you to catch, uh_

_I’m running out so this is never gonna last, your_

_not catching up, ‘cause now I’m ten times faster_

The whiskey is blood-hot on his tongue, but the lyrics burn hotter. He can’t touch them without recoiling. They were rotting inside of him before he wrote them down. The crowd tries to ingest ideas that they don’t understand, and their bodies spasm like they’re rejecting a transfusion.

Letting Aaron bow his head over his guitar and streak through the chords he wrote to accompany one of his breakdowns is one of the ugliest things Andrew has ever allowed to happen.

He thinks about putting the words in Neil’s mouth and it makes his fists clench around his sticks.

He kicks into overdrive until his wrists strain and sweat gets in his eyes, and then he hammers his way through the line up of drums, looking for a crash big enough to punch his eardrums out, to shriek with feedback and blow out the sound system.

The song screams to a close, fans clap and call for more, Kevin drinks vodka from a plastic tumbler, Nicky keeps curtseying to get the audience to laugh. Neil peers up at them with his shirt falling down all over again, grey fabric patched with humidity and spilled liquor.

Andrew thinks, bleak, flushed down to his wrists,  _I brought this on myself_.

_______

Neil finds them when they’re hefting their equipment out from a backstage platform to the parking lot. It’s an assembly line of passing and loading that Andrew stays apart from, sitting sideways in the front seat of the van with his feet kicked up on the door, smoking from the clear, petite bong that Nicky usually keeps in his cupholder.

He meets Neil’s eye for a second, then viciously ignores him, slipping the bowl out by its stem to clear the smoke. It’s too much for one hit, and it spills out of his mouth, fogs his vision, sits down on his chest so he can’t really focus on anything but the high.

Neil’s saying something to Nicky, hopping down out of the loading docks to help them.

“You were good,” Neil says, closer now, “without the drugs.” He has this pointed look on his face, those viciously blue eyes are street signs that Andrew can’t read.

He puts the bong down behind him, focusing hard, and when he looks up, whatever usually holds his tongue isn’t there anymore. “Ah, but I don’t want to be good, Neil,” he says, thin laughter like syrup drizzled over everything. “I want to see how badly I have to play to be kicked out of the band. It’s a game I play.”

“I don’t believe you,” Neil says, angry, defensive on Andrew’s behalf. “If you really wanted to, you’d pull one of those knives.” He nods at Andrew’s unassuming black armbands, heavy with concealed blades. “Trash the place.”

“Oh,” Andrew says. He doesn’t want to laugh again, but the weed makes him overly conscious of the way his mouth works, and of Neil’s mouth, and of what they are and aren’t to each other. “He thinks because he’s been watching for a minute that he knows who I am.”

“No.” Neil’s brow twists. “I’m trying to figure out why someone with your talent isn’t living up to your potential. You could play stadiums with that talent, I mean, your—the stage presence alone—Andrew?”

He hops out of the car and slams the door to overcompensate for the way he stumbles. The high softens his joints and the ground bucks up and tries to pull him close. “Hmm. Rather not.”

“That’s crazy,” Neil says, following him. His shoes are scuffed and his shirt is coming untucked and that tongue piercing, that red split of his mouth—

“Don’t really like that word,” Andrew says, feverish and unstable, his whole body a balancing act gone wrong. Neil’s starting to look like a smoky mirage, a fantasy who doesn’t know how to be one.

“I don’t care what you like,” Neil says, impatient, and Andrew tips his grin up to the dusky sky, on the edge of panic, feeling the drugs make everything huge, feeling himself get smaller.

“That’s what they all say.” He stops short, on the edge of the parking lot, cold air buffeting against the heat of the drugs, both trying to find purchase in his addled brain. Neil comes around to face him, and when Andrew steps forward, he steps back, maintaining the pocket of space between them. Something in Andrew’s chest gets crushed flat like a soda can. “For someone with no identity, you seem overly interested in mine.”

Neil’s face contorts. He’s so easy to read when he’s caught off guard. That, or the drugs make Andrew think he can see things that aren’t there. “I’ve told you who I am.”

“No, no, no,” Andrew replies. “You’ve given me a first name, and a debt, and a conflicted childhood, but you don’t sound like you’ve meant a single word of it.”

“I can’t convince you of the truth if you don’t want to believe it,” Neil retorts. His piercings are like scattered silverware. His lies curl so prettily in his mouth that Andrew thinks,  _I could suck you until there’s nothing left but honesty_.

“I’m tired of this conversation,” Andrew says definitively. “You underestimate how many times I’ve been lied to.”

“Josten,” Neil says. Andrew cocks his head, sluggish. “Neil Abram Josten. I’m a singer. I don’t like you, or understand you. That’s all you need to know.”

“It’s mutual,” Andrew says, meaning it. He hates the way Neil looks and acts and the way the two never match up for long enough to create a clear picture. “Your obsession with performing is already grating.”

“Your indifference is infuriating,” Neil replies. “We’re even.”

“We’re not,” Andrew says. It’s dangerous, how much he’s starting to feel. All the colour he’s putting in his voice is sticky and saturated on the roof of his mouth. “You were floundering and I stopped you from drowning, remember?”

“Do you want me to say thank you?” Neil snarls, that fascinating, hair-trigger temper. He fists his hand in his own shirt and Andrew tracks the movement, off-centre, hazy, when Neil yanks the collar down to expose the vicious blue brushing from where Andrew hit him with the guitar. The scars slither into the window of exposed skin, and Neil seems to realize all at once what he’s doing. The shirt bounces back, wrinkled.

“If you think I needed to be saved from the back of a bar with my pockets full of cash, then you don’t really know what drowning looks like.”

Andrew grabs him by the scruff of his shirt, that grey slipping neckline that he’s been eyeing all night. He trips them both back a couple of steps, losing his balance, but Neil must think he’s being intimidated, because he grabs Andrew’s wrist hard. 

The tattooed word  _yes_  stares back at him from beneath the dramatic slope of Neil’s jaw. “Au contraire,” he says, and he’s smiling, but he can’t pry the seriousness from his tone, or his hands from Neil’s chest. “Everything I do is from underwater.”

“Then what exactly is it that you think you can do for me except slow me down?” Neil asks, forcing himself away from Andrew’s grip and stumbling into the patch of sidewalk right before the curb becomes open road.

“I gave you a spot in our line up, but that won’t keep you alive,” Andrew says. “I’ve heard there are people out for your blood. Or was that another lie?”

Neil ignores his last question, shoulders rising. “Are you threatening me?”

“So touchy,” Andrew teases. “I’m doing the opposite, actually. If you’re with us you’re with us. No one can touch you.”

Neil’s eyes flicker over him, brows pulling further and further together. “You’re offering—what? Protection? Before you even know what I’m dealing with?”

“Your monsters don’t scare me.”

“Yours do,” Neil huffs, looking out at the blinking, spinning, beeping cityscape. “But okay. Deal.” He can tell from Neil’s face that he’s not really taking him seriously.

“Hey! Stop running off!” Nicky calls, out of breath, jogging towards them from halfway across the parking lot. 

Andrew wasn’t even aware of covering that much ground. His fists go loose at his sides. He can’t tell if it’s the pot or Neil’s devastating presence that’s scrambling everything into pieces.

“But that’s his M.O.,” Andrew calls back, and Neil snaps him a burning look, the crack of a match, the miracle of a flame.

“Well cut it out,” Nicky says good-naturedly, rolling to a stop in front of them. “I wanted to hear what you thought of the show while the adrenaline’s still fresh.” He leans down to Neil’s level, hands on his knees like he’s talking to a child, and Andrew shoves him back without thinking.

“You guys are better than me,” Neil says frankly. “I don’t know how I’m going to fit into your sound.”

“Oh fuck off,” Nicky says, at a measured distance now. “You’re a natural, like Andrew. And you’re obsessed, like Kevin, so there’s no way you’re not going to fit in. Now please can we get in the van, I packed a new bowl and I’m jonesing.”

“Where are we going now?” Neil asks carefully. Andrew can see the way he’s chafing in the Annapolis air, like he’s having an allergic reaction.

“Home,” Nicky says. “South Carolina.”

Neil nods jerkily. Andrew squints through the fog of his high, and he can see for the first time that Neil’s pretty drunk, he’s just been holding it in the pocket of his cheek and talking through it.

“How long is that drive?”

“Not long if you’re wasted,” Nicky says, and the energy of his excitement tips against Neil like a flame and sets him going. Andrew watches Neil smile through bitten lips and accept the refilled flask. “If we get you drunk enough can we hear those golden pipes of yours again? No one ever does karaoke with me.”

He’s steering them back through the parking lot, encouraging Neil to drain the swampy mixed liquor he’s put together from the drinks fans bought him. He always has this way of getting you where he wants you without you knowing it was his idea.

Neil sways forward like he’s grooving to music, his cheeks pink from the cold and alcohol. “I’ve never done karaoke before,” he says.

“You’re killing me,” Nicky complains. “What sort of sheltered fucking town did you crawl out of?”

Neil hesitates, and Andrew’s filterless mouth curls. “Baltimore,” he guesses. “One of his big bad secrets.”

“Oh shit!” Nicky exclaims, shoving Neil a little by the shoulder. “Less than an hour from home. You know, I can talk to Kev and we can totally drop in—“

“No,” Neil says, quick and harsh as a pulled tooth. “That’s not my home.”

“You don’t have one of those, right?” Andrew says. Neil’s eyes flicker towards him.

“Right,” he agrees, all the fight sapped out of his voice. Andrew looks out at the sleek shape of his van, the fogged up windows, Aaron and Kevin haloed by the yellow interior lights. He doesn’t know why, but his chest is a kicked in drum.

“We’ll make you one,” Nicky says gently. “Did you know that SC is famous for its peach pie? Doesn’t get homier than that.”

_______

Nicky nurses his bong from the back seat of the van as soon as they get back on the road. The water bubbles, and he deftly lights close to the side of the bowl to keep the burn steady. 

Andrew slouches in the middle seat, watching the low light exaggerate Nicky’s hollow cheeks and tease moving pictures out of Neil’s mouth when he sucks on his tongue piercing.

“It’s still cherry,” Nicky says hoarsely, and passes to Neil, who crooks the base against his knee and leans down to smoke.

His ashy hair brushes his downcast eyes, and Andrew shakes his head so that he doesn’t keep watching him.

“You shouldn’t be smoking,” Kevin calls from the passenger seat. When Andrew looks up, he’s twisted around in his seat to look at Neil, pupils too wide open to be natural.

“Forgive me if I don’t take advice from the man who choked me out today,” Neil says, smoke spilling out around his words. Andrew inhales.

“It’s not advice,” Kevin snaps. “It’s an order.”

Neil laughs, mean. “Nice try. I’ll follow your ‘orders’ when you prove you’re a worthy leader. Hasn’t happened yet.” He bows his head to take another hit.

“Andrew,” Kevin says imploringly.

“Uh uh,” Andrew scolds. “He said no.”

“No one takes this band seriously at all, do they?” Kevin says. He looks so perpetually disappointed. His talent is withering, and Andrew will only ever do enough to keep it alive, not to see it bloom.

“Ding ding ding,” Andrew says.

“Hey, I care, Kev,” Nicky says. “Ausreißer is like the second best thing in my life.”

“What—“ Neil starts.

“Don’t ask,” Aaron says, not looking away from the road.

“My fiancé Erik. 6’2” German supermodel. Swimmer’s body, blue eyes. You know my type.” Nicky winks at Neil, and Andrew’s lip curls.

“I didn’t know,” Neil says. His expression whispers that he’s even more uncomfortable with Nicky’s flirtation.

Nicky waves him off. “Fans don’t know much about us. Some don’t even know I’m related to the twins. Makes it easier to be kind of shitty if they don’t even really know our last names.”

“I suppose that’s not an option for you anymore,  _Josten_ ,” Andrew says, loopy, the orange glow of the pot keeping him half distracted. Neil looks at him with those paint-spill eyes, and Andrew feels stupid for the way his feelings are talking over his thoughts.

“Good thing I have nothing to hide,” he replies.

“Oh, I hope that’s not true,” Nicky says.

“It’s not,” Andrew says. Headlights outside flash and fade over the three of them huddled in the back seats, crashing waves of bright white. 

Andrew wants to take Neil by the scars, like reins, and pull him up short. He wants the whirring behind Neil’s eyes to stop so he can take the tape out and unspool it.

“Can we talk music now?” Kevin says impatiently. “I want to figure out some backing vocals now that we have a lead.”

“Yes,” Neil says immediately. “What’s the plan?”

Andrew tunes them out. The air is still heavy with smoke. He’s not wearing a seatbelt, so the van is tossing him a little, his seat bucking, engine buzzing in his feet. 

He watches Neil drape himself over the back of the empty middle seat to look at Kevin, both of them talking about harmonies, using sound affects and hand gestures for time signatures, cocked towards each other like two loaded weapons caught in a stand off.

Andrew wonders what makes someone so obsessed and so detached at once.

He wonders if the flip and burn of his attraction to Neil made him do something stupid like tie himself to a runaway train.

The van cracks down the highway, and South Carolina charges towards them. He wonders if either of them will flinch before impact, or if he’ll hit home head-on like he always does.

________

They skid into Columbia before the sun’s all the way up, but it’s already steaming hot. Andrew squints at the familiar shape of the studio from the parking lot. It’s an obnoxious sunset orange building with graffiti around the side that says ‘no more monsters’. Underneath, someone’s spray-painted a rabid looking wolf in a circle with a bar through it.

Andrew waits to feel the roar and snap of anger, but his temple pulses with a headache, and he’s unmoved.

“Welcome to Palmetto Records, home of Ausreißer,” Nicky says, beaming. “And Foxes, if you’ve heard of them.”

“Foxes as in the girl group on the radio?” Neil asks incredulously. He looks a little grey and burnt out, hair raked back and shoes kicked off. He didn’t sleep all night, like he was proving a point about privacy, or he was insistent on keeping Andrew aware and preoccupied until sunrise.

“Their guitarist is Matt Boyd,” Kevin corrects.

“Nice dude,” Nicky says.

“But you sound nothing like them,” Neil says. “How can you even be part of the same label?”

“That’s not really how labels work,” Aaron says. He’s looking out through the windshield like he doesn’t want to go inside.

“We’re multi-genre,” Kevin says airily. “But we don’t really interact with them anyway.”

_“He_  doesn’t,” Nicky says, rolling his eyes. “I like them. Dan’s kinda icy, but she’s a catch, Matt’s lucky. Allison’s a bitch. Renee’s definitely the best. Do what you will with that.” He rests his hand on the door handle and taps his fingers, jittery.

“Are they here a lot?” Neil asks. “Will I meet them?”

“You’re stalling,” Andrew interrupts.

Neil doesn’t even look at him, just sighs and reaches down for his bag.

It’s clear that he thinks this is the end of the road. The nebulous space in their lives between streetlights and chains of shared cigarettes could evaporate as soon as he crosses an official threshold.

Andrew can see the crease between his dark brows, his squared shoulders, the fingers pinching his belongings as if he’s getting ready to run with them.

Neil moves to open the door, and without thinking, Andrew says, “Wymack does not turn away talent.”

“He might turn it away if it’s attached to an idiot,” Aaron mutters.

Neil ignores him, and his mouth twitches in Andrew’s direction. “Talent? I thought you were difficult to ‘wow’?”

Andrew looks away. His head hurts.

“Come on, freaks,” Nicky says, pushing at Neil’s shoulder until he pulls the door open, dropping his shoes out on the pavement and stepping into them.

“Paperwork first, studio second,” Kevin says. “Don’t touch the equipment until you’ve read the contract.”

“This is all moot if your manager doesn’t want me,” Neil says, shouldering his bag and squinting against the pale morning sun.

“Whatever,” Nicky says. “We want you. Bad.”

“Don’t speak for me,” Aaron says.

“Debatable,” Kevin says.

Andrew says nothing.

They trudge towards the backdoor, and Andrew pushes past them to punch in the code. They push into the air-conditioned hallway, dark grey walls against pale flooring. 

He watches Neil react to the curve of the hall opening up into an orange and cream waiting room with leather couches, hallways forking in every direction, recording studios peering out from behind glass.

Neil’s eyes are wide, his shirt is still stained, tucked into jeans that are ripped up too high to be intentional, and his hair is fried, red bleeding into yellow. He looks the same way everyone looks when Wymack baits them into Palmetto, damaged and bribed, desperate for an out.

He also looks like he doesn’t trust the decor, like he felt safer in the claws of a crowd of strangers or the teeth of a hangover than he does in this quiet, tidy atrium, with four people between him and the exit.

“What did you drag in this time?”

Wymack stands sideways in the doorway with a hand on the wall, like he was passing by when he spotted them.

“We found a singer,” Nicky announces, grinning.

Wymack grimaces. “No.”

Nicky’s face falls. “Come on, boss.”

“We’re not making any more changes to the line up, Hemmick, no matter how much you want to bang them.”

“But Kevin worked out great! Kind of.”

A shadow passes over his face. “Kevin’s different.”

“This is Wymack,” Andrew tells Neil. “You are nothing to him until you’ve proven yourself to be useful.”

“You’re not nothing,” Wymack says sharply, addressing Neil directly. “I just don’t trust these fuckers as far as I can throw them.”

Neil’s eyes narrow. “Neither do I.” Wymack quirks a smile, doubtless picturing Neil trying to punt someone twice his size any distance at all.

“You should sign him,” Andrew says. Wymack steps further into the room, crossing his arms.

“ _You’re_  vouching for him? I don’t know if that should be a warning bell or a glowing review.”

Aaron snorts.

“He can sing,” Kevin chimes in. “He needs work, but I’m willing to put in the time if you are.”

Wymack raises a brow. “You’re all in on this? That’s new.”

“They’re desperate,” Neil says. “But I’m not. So if you’re going to interrogate me for much longer, I’ll go ahead and hitch a ride back to Virginia.”

“Oh he’s one of you, alright,” Wymack says tiredly. “You got a name?”

“Neil,” he says, swallowing. “Josten.”

“Neil Josten,” Wymack repeats. “You know what Ausreißer means?”

He shrugs, listing, “outlier. Runaway. Wild shot.”

“Right. Does that sound like a group that I have any control over?” he asks. His eyes are narrowed but his mouth is turned up, unthreatening.

“I think you think you do. You have their names written on some papers in a drawer somewhere, and you think that means you own them.” Neil’s expression is wild. He’s trying so hard to get out of a trap that he’s hurting himself.

“All I own is the nameplate for that office,” Wymack gestures behind him at a door that’s ajar halfway down the hall, “and the mini fridge in studio two. Sprung for it myself.”

“You’re the boss,” Neil says flatly.

“That’s what they call me,” Wymack agrees. “I open the door for people. They walk in or they don’t. Their call. Do  _you_  want in?”

“Depends. Does the door lock behind me?”

Wymack rolls his eyes. “You’re going to be a problem, aren’t you?”

“He already is,” Aaron says.

Wymack looks back and forth between them, vaguely amused. “Are you even legal, kid?”

Andrew watches Neil hesitate. “I’m twenty-one.”

“Well, come on in. Let’s get you someplace to sing.”

_______

Wymack leads them to the main recording studio, and as soon as they’re inside, Aaron drops his heavy backpack, and Nicky collapses into the wheeled leather chair in front of the control board.

“Alright.” Wymack jerks his thumb towards the live room. “Get in there. Sing me something pretty.”

“Can I make a request?” Nicky asks sweetly.

“No,” Neil says easily. He abandons his duffel and crosses the threshold towards the sealed off equipment, propped up microphones, and heaps of wires. “I know what I want to sing.”

He worries his tongue stud briefly, pulling the mic down to his level. He looks so washed out in the harsh overhead light, but it’s not bad on him. He’s too athletic and cocksure to look sick.

“Now?” Neil asks. his fist is clenched at the base of the microphone, and his gravity is clipped to that point.

“Unless you’re waiting for some sort of divine intervention,” Wymack says, “now would be good.”

Neil breathes in. Andrew doesn’t.

He starts singing one of Andrew’s songs, but he’s pitched it higher, trussed it up in that crystal clear tone he’s got, and thrown in candied pieces of ornamentation. 

Just like the first time, his shoulders relax, his neck arches, and the music wanders out of him like it’s looking for victims, like it’s stronger the more people it absorbs.

Andrew’s so gutted, so trapped, that he almost doesn’t realize that it’s the song they were playing when he first spotted Neil, when he was playing a character, drunk and lost, skulking around for things to steal.

They’re both completely sober now, and Neil is incredible when he’s glass-clear. His voice expands and expands, and he’s so close to the microphone that his lips whisper across it.

Andrew’s words aren’t ugly when Neil sings them. He makes his crumpled papers into airplanes. He sets the studio on fire. Andrew looks away, and it’s like pulling a hand off a stovetop and losing half his skin.

Wymack is easing back on the couch, smiling, and Nicky’s spinning laughing circles in his chair. Kevin’s gone perfectly still like he does when he’s reading Andrew’s lyrics for the first time. Aaron’s leaning all the way forward, head propped on his hand, focused.

When he turns back to watch Neil’s cracked face, heart pounding, he wonders how someone with such tough, impenetrable skin can sing like he’s being bled.


	3. Chapter 3

He signs the contract.

Everything quickly becomes a whirlwind of compliments that backslide into critique, nettles and silk flowers. Neil’s throat hurts and his hands sweat on the mic stand, but he feels buoyant and hot, a balloon with a burning string.

The bulk and volume of someone like Wymack had sidelined him, but he’d started speaking like an impatient exy coach, arms always crossed and mouth always curling, and Neil clung to that familiarity like a raft.

Andrew keeps watching Neil like he’s trying to hurt him without going to the trouble of touching him. Neil had seen him frowning back in the studio, a downswing in the lineup of encouraging or neutral expressions he’d caught through the darkly reflective glass.

Nicky gave him a tour with his arm linked in Neil’s, and the further into the maze of halls they got, the more he let himself relax. He’s not on stage yet. His name is written down, alphabetically after Nicky and before the twins, a weird, foreign wedge in their family. But it’s not real yet, he reminds himself, it’s still a promise registered under a false name.

Wymack ends up intercepting them when they swing too close to his office, Nicky’s voice bubbling over like champagne, and tells them all to get the hell out.

They drive through the yellow mid-morning to a squat grey house tucked into a residential area on the East side. Neil rides shotgun with the sun baking him through the wide open windshield, but the cold creeps in again as soon as they’re parked.

It’s the strangest combination of chilly air and blistering sunshine, and Neil’s caught constantly between sweating and shivering.

Andrew scuffs gravel on his way to the front door, keys splayed and held still so they don’t jangle. It’s like something Neil would have done to stay undetectable, when he used to listen to his mother’s rules.

“You live here?” Neil asks. He shields his eyes against the sun, fixating on the cracked cement driveways bleached white, a broken gutter coughing away from the house next door. It doesn’t look like the sort of neighbourhood that could fit its hands around the clash of drum kits and personalities.

“Sometimes,” Aaron says noncommittally. Andrew cracks the door open, and the grey interior leans out towards them.

It’s a shade warmer inside, and the other four of them drop keys and bags and shoes in some unfathomable order. Neil keeps his duffel bag hugged to his hip, and pushes his hair back with clammy hands. An overhead fan kicks on, humming and thumping, and the stuffy air starts to move.

“That’s the only empty room,” Andrew tells him, pointing at a propped door at the end of the hall. “Pretend you know how to be a guest.”

Neil ignores him, trudging to the door and cuffing it further open with the tip of a tennis shoe. The blinds are open, pale wallpaper and beige carpet fried by the sun. There’s an ancient looking dresser lounging against the far wall, and Neil jimmies it open to drop his duffel bag inside, shoving it’s bulk down into the corners.

There’s no lock, but it makes such a terrible, broken noise when it’s opened that it’s almost a security measure.

When he makes to stand up again he’s light-headed, anxious sweat trickling down his temple, hands braced on the dark wood. He catches his reflection in the vanity mirror at the same time that the sweat finds his eyes, and he flinches through the sting.

Neil pries a fresh shirt from his bag and leans on the closed door to change. He lets himself watch the opposite wall for a minute, alone for the first time since he walked in on Ausreißer and they absorbed him into their ranks. He can hear the cadence of Nicky talking to Kevin just outside the door, musical and excited then punchy and low. Somewhere in the house, a door opens and shuts.

Here in this relentlessly ordinary room, lawnmower roaring outside, privacy chewed into pieces, he can’t believe he let himself into a trap, familiarized himself with its mechanism, and still let it sink its teeth into him.

The ghost of his mother’s hand curls in his hair and yanks.

There’s a knock on the door, right behind the place where is head is thrown back, and his whole body cramps, half inside a memory, anticipating violence.

“We’re going out tonight,” Kevin’s voice says, muffled through the wood. “Get your shit together by six.”

“Are you playing somewhere?” Neil asks, turning over so his forehead is pressed up against the doorframe.

“Drinking somewhere,” Kevin corrects.

“Letting off steam,” Nicky trills, farther away but just as loud.

Neil cracks the door open, and Nicky’s eyes find him from all the way down the hall, ricocheting from his damp hairline down to his clean white shirt.

“Cute,” he says, mouth quirked. “And I can say that, because the boss stepped out.”

“He’s not the boss,” Kevin says, automatic.

“What exactly do you need to let off steam from? This morning’s hangover?”

“You got it,” Nicky chirps, unbothered. “That was work drinking, Neil. This is gonna be end of the world drinking.”

“I’ll pass,” he replies.

Nicky laughs, walking out toward the living room. “Uh huh. I’ll let you tell Andrew that.”

He considers for an uneasy second, then lets himself ask, “why do you all defer to him?” He thinks of the yes and no stamped on Andrew’s hands like he’s some sort of balancing, decision-making deity. Justice, personified. He follows Nicky to the sitting area and stops short at the outskirts, half a step from comfort. “What does he have on you?”

“He watches our backs,” Nicky says slowly, chewing on something from a folded over bag someone left on the couch.

“So you let him control your life?”

“Neil,” Nicky says firmly, smiling. “You don’t know anything about him.”

“So tell me.”

“So ask  _him_ ,” Kevin says.

“What, because he’s such a fucking forthright person?” Neil says sarcastically.

“Oh my  _god_ , pot, kettle,” Nicky laughs.

Neil hugs his own elbows and looks out towards the narrow windows framing the front door, the frosted glass distorting shapes outside into suggestions of themselves. He runs his tongue over his teeth before he speaks again.

“I have a right to know what kind of person is calling the shots in this group, now that I’m part of it.”

“Yeah, on paper,” Aaron says from behind him. “In ink. Andrew only honours contracts made in blood.”

Neil doesn’t mention the bargain he’d struck with Andrew in the parking lot, or the way that every conversation they’ve had feels like a needle piercing flesh, skating close to his veins.

Aaron and Kevin bundle onto a settee and a recliner, respectively, and Neil feels stupid, out of place, standing at the edge of the carpet waiting to be invited in.

“What if I’m not willing to do that?” Neil asks, a little sourly. It’s like cutting off the promise he made to his mother and grafting it onto Andrew instead. It’s a betrayal, a relief, and a blood letting, and he’s too light-headed to think about it too hard.

“What, shed blood?” Aaron asks, watching him appraisingly.

“Then you’re in the wrong band, baby,” Nicky says.

“I’m starting to think that, yeah.”

The overhead fan whines, and Nicky’s chips crinkle when he passes them to Aaron. “Don’t be so dramatic. Come sit down.”

Neil complies without hesitation, sinking into the free side of the couch and putting one knee up. The chips come his way and he shakes his head.

“Where is he now?” he asks, off-colour casual, the question he’s been trying to suppress for the better part of five minutes.

“Errands, he said,” Nicky replies, shrugging. “He works in mysterious ways.”

Neil thinks of him blowing pot smoke and tripping backwards, laughing like he was taking a bite out the air and spitting it out again, sobriety leeching everything out of him except a bitter sort of hunger. He thinks,  _I’ve never had time for mysteries before_.

_______

Andrew comes back with a sleek black shopping bag and a boxful of amber hair dye, and he tosses it in Neil’s lap on his way by.

“What’s this?” He scoops the bag up delicately with his last two fingers. Andrew gives him a bland look.

“You need to be presentable.”

Nicky plucks the bag from his lax grip and unrolls the top, picking through whatever’s inside and grinning. “God, give me strength. You’re gonna look so hot.” He tosses him the bag and dark slashed fabric spills out.

“No,” Neil says immediately.

“Yes,” Nicky argues. “We can’t be seen with you if you’re swimming in hand-me-downs and jean shorts, like. We have a brand.”

“It’s not like you have anything else to wear,” Aaron says. “You live out of a duffle bag.”

Neil pointedly ignores him, facing Andrew instead. “I don’t want to owe you anything.”

“This is for our benefit,” Andrew says. “You’re going to be standing in the centre of our sets from now on, do you understand?” Neil looks flintily back at him. “You will look how I want you to look.”

Neil fingers the rough pair of black jeans, neck hot with embarrassment. “Fine. But I’m  _not_  dying my hair,” he says, avoiding the box altogether.

Nicky starts complaining about there being too many blonds in their line up, but Neil keeps shaking his head until Andrew catches his eye, cocks his head, and tells him to throw the dye in the trash.

He wanders into the kitchen to drop off the other bags he’d brought in with him, and Neil watches him go, worrying his bottom lip.

“He just wants you to look like you belong with us,” Nicky tells him conspiratorially. “We have to market you somehow.”

“Why don’t I fit in by proving myself on stage? Why do I have to dress my talent up in hundred dollar jeans?”

“Uh, it’s called the entertainment industry. You don’t have to care, but you have to look like you do.”

“That’s idiotic.”

“Or fun,” Nicky counters. “You’ll get the hang of it.”

He catches Aaron rolling his eyes and he bristles. “Something you want to say?” Neil asks.

Aaron meets his eyes. “Yeah, actually. I don’t like you. I don’t understand why you’re here, and tonight I’m going to drink to forget we ever found you.”

“Be my guest. Maybe the liquor will make you less excruciating to be around.”

“Jesus, can you guys cut that shit out? Take a fucking nap or something,” Nicky says. Aaron stands without hesitation. He cuts his way across the room and all the way down the stairs, scissors gliding through paper. There’s an uncomfortable beat, and then Nicky says, pained, “I’ll talk to him.”

“Don’t bother,” Neil says. “His opinions couldn’t mean less to me.”

“Right,” Nicky says uneasily.

“I’m gonna—” he starts, and slides off the couch, sidling between clunky coffee tables towards the kitchen. Andrew’s loading obnoxiously flavoured creamer into the fridge, and Neil catches the corner of hot chocolate mix ducking out of the open cupboard.

“You should spend your money on things that have a use,” Neil says, prodding childishly at the white wound of Andrew’s indifference. He ducked out of the house for two hours and came back with his hands full of every useless thing but emotion.

“I should do whatever I want,” Andrew replies, “And you should stop trying to prove something to me.”

Neil lapses into silence, tongue folded against the roof of his mouth like Andrew stapled it there. He leans into the sharp wooden siding on the countertop, and Andrew looks back at him.

“Hand me that knife.”

Neil does, soundlessly, unsheathing the smallest one from the knife block and passing it handle first. Andrew flips it familiarly so he can slit the plastic off of a frosty tub of ice cream. He pops the lid, pries out a chunk, and eats it off the blunt side of the knife before it can melt. Neil watches him with distaste.

“Did Kevin tell you where we’re going?” Andrew bites another chunk of rolos and cream and tucks the tub into the freezer.

“Some bar, right?” Neil says noncommittally. He’s looking at the way the sun comes in in pieces through the blinds and makes the room look more interesting than it actually is.

“Our bar,” Andrew corrects. “And we are keeping it that way. Try not to skulk around in the back this time.”

“I do actually have impulse control,” Neil says, exasperated.

“I will believe it when I see it.”

“You’d know if I lost control,” Neil insists.

Andrew eyes him, interest moving over him like cast shadow. “I barely know you.”

“I didn’t know you when you clocked me with a guitar,” Neil points out.

“That wasn’t lost control.”

“Oh yeah? I’d hate to see what that looks like, then.”

“You would,” Andrew agrees.

They stare at each other. Neil’s annoyed, hyperaware, though he doesn’t understand why. He can feel a stripe of light on his face, and if he ducked, it would blind him. 

He withstands the tension for another five counted seconds, then retreats wordlessly into the darkness of the hallway.

He grabs the shopping bag viciously off the couch where he left it, ignoring Nicky’s opening mouth, and stalks off to the room, his room, the place with the door that locks and the window that opens.

The clothes fit him too well, tailored to his broad shoulders and narrow waist. Neil remembers, searingly embarrassed, the way Andrew had flipped through his belongings and felt the shape and size of things firsthand. He might as well have touched Neil directly. He’s half surprised he didn’t jolt and wake that night, when Andrew unzipped his life and reached inside.

The jeans are ripped at the knees, where he has two or three circular white scars hole-punched out of him, but the rest of him is mercifully covered. The shirt is dark and knit, and the neck is loose. He laces up heavy boots and enjoys the stable feeling of them, the damage they could do.

He checks the dresser to make sure everything is in its place, and sits in the centre of the bed.

Time passes slowly, greyly, soberly.

He thinks about the way Andrew roots everyone else when he’s around, even when he’s scrambled and high. When he’s sober, he’s sparse and unreadable, but when he’s not, he’s an abundant foreign language, just as remote. 

Neil feels obsessed. He can’t understand it. He should have figured him out by now.

He looks at the ceiling and thinks about running away out of habit. Then he thinks about staying, adapting, waiting long enough to become something new. He thinks about the moment that Andrew ate ice cream from a knife, and thinks,  _I can do that. I can hold a weapon to my mouth if it means I get something out of it. I can take blood with my sugar._

______

Eden’s Twilight strains all of the conflict out of them. Aaron pinches shots between his fingers and furrows his brow when he takes them. Kevin gulps surreptitiously from a flask, and Andrew and Nicky disappear to a back room with a stocky looking bartender, coming back stilted and twitchy, pupils blown out. Nicky keeps laughing circles around Neil, holding both his hands in his sweaty ones.

“Have you met Roland? Have you met—“ Nicky squints at Neil and then looks out into the crowd like someone called his name.

“No,” Neil says. “You asked me, before.”

“Did I?” he laughs. “I just want to show you off.” He holds Neil’s neck, but lets go when he ducks away. “You’re so twitchy. You wanna smoke a joint?”

“No,” Neil says again. His hairline is sweaty and his shirt is starting to get unbearably humid.

“Leave him alone, Nicky,” Andrew singsongs. “Stop trying to micromanage everyone else’s highs.”

In truth, Neil’s only a few drinks in and he’s already on the precipice of miserable.

Nicky says, “I just want everyone to have fun.”

Neil knows he looks uncomfortable, and Andrew’s eyes bore into the side of his face. He doesn’t look away when he asks Nicky to “go get Neil a whiskey.”

‘Ew, okay,” Nicky says. He turns to Neil. “Rocks, neat?”

“I don’t care.” He’s preoccupied, thinking about how anything could find its way into an open drink between here and the bar.

As soon as Nicky’s gone, Andrew leans close enough that Neil can see the colour of his eyes, even in the pounding half-darkness.

“What are you on?”

“None of your business.”

Neil hums. “You’re going to burn out before thirty, at this rate,” he tells him.

“Oh, certainly,” Andrew agrees. “I never thought I’d live this long.”

Neil looks at him head on, suspicious, pulse hitching. “Me neither,” he murmurs. It’s a trick of the irregular light, but Andrew’s face looks hollow and wet, like he’s been caught in a lightning storm.

His gaze strays beyond his shoulder, overwhelmed, and that’s when he sees him.

He’s hovering at the bar, leather jacket and sparse facial hair, so much older than when Neil used to avoid his eyes as a child. One of his father’s old contacts, who would rev into their driveway in a black pickup, and back out with corpses under a tarp in the truck bed.

Neil lurches, wheels, puts a hand on Andrew’s arm so he can heave past him. His wrist is snared immediately, Andrew’s grip completely unaffected by whatever’s in his system. But Neil’s panic is razor sharp, so it slits the hand off of him anyway.

He pushes through the crowd hands first, feeling someone follow him, hoping it’s Andrew and not someone who could look through his gifted clothes and stripped hair and see all of the rearranged shards of his father.

He can’t fathom what he’d be doing here other than tracking Neil down. The thought of being caged and peeled away from the monsters just as he’d really, truly decided to hold onto something is unthinkable.

Fingers graze his back and he cries out, trips.

“Neil?” someone says. His spine pulls rod-straight. None of his father’s men would call him that. He stops running against the current of swaying people, stunned, and finds Kevin blinking at him. He’s flushed from dancing and drinking, and some of his hair stands straight up. He couldn’t look less threatening, but Neil remembers his hands around his throat with an unexpected throb of fear. “Where are you going?”

“I saw—“ He swallows, turning, expecting a victorious face to come slicing through the crowd, a coarse hand with a secret knife, the full bulk of someone who regularly drags bodies out into the woods. Andrew comes into view instead, face twisted with fury.

“What is this?” he hisses. He doesn’t try to touch Neil this time.

“I can’t,” Neil starts. His heart is pounding so hard he feels dizzy. Coloured lasers slide over him, exposing as searchlights, and he flinches.

“Is he running away?” he hears Kevin ask.

“Yes,” Andrew says. “I’m just trying to figure out how far.”

Neil shakes his head. “I can’t be here,” he says more firmly. His voice is branded with panic, steaming with it. He spots the guy—Alexander something, some germanic last name—milling towards the same dance floor where Neil is motionless, terrified into paralysis.

He’s forgotten how to run. He was sprinting constantly for years, teeth gritted through the strain of perpetual motion, and the second he stops and sits down, his feet hurt so badly that he can’t even stand on them.

Alexander’s eyes find his. Neil sags, dizzy with loss.

He waits for the violence of recognition, the shark smile, the kicking, swimming pursuit. He thinks about being one of those bodies in his truck, tossed in with the others like firewood. He’s not looking at Andrew, but his face occurs to him anyway, vivid as a stamp.

Neil watches the eyes slide over him, indifferent, and continue to scan the crowd.

Miraculously, he’s been ignored.

“Oh,” Neil says, light-headed.

“What?”

He starts to fall down, like a paper someone tried to balance on its end, and Andrew catches him under the arms. He’s pulled and arranged properly on his feet, and Kevin and Andrew speak over his head, clipped, loaded sentences, like bullet points.

“One of your monsters?” Andrew murmurs in his ear, and Neil laughs inappropriately, stupid with relief.

“What the fuck did I miss?” Nicky says from somewhere beside him, and the next second a frosty glass is being pressed into his hand. The sensations are unreasonably grounding, frozen fingers and Andrew’s steady presence at his back.

He downs the whiskey in one, searing his mouth and dragging nausea up his throat.

“Neil tried to pull a vanishing act.”

Nicky’s quiet for an uncomfortable second, then he shrugs. “Okay. He’s here, though.” He taps the bottom of the glass in Neil’s hand. “Sorry if I was too much. I’m—so fucking high, dude.”

Neil shakes his head quickly. “It wasn’t you.”

“Was it Andrew?” Nicky asks in a conspiratorial whisper. “You can tell me.”

“Do you still need to leave?” Andrew asks.

“Please,” Neil says.

Andrew’s mouth flattens. “Don’t—not that word.”

Neil considers this, puzzled, but swallows the word anyway, like it’s a key to a safe that isn’t his.

The crowd pulls apart easily now, with Andrew tugging him along by the arm, the panic that was cracking his ribcage loosened and discarded. Nicky and Kevin stay behind, seeking out Aaron in the chaos, and Neil’s relieved. It’s like they’ve chosen teams.

The weird, short run through the crowd, the entire horrifying episode of Neil’s weakness, seems to have injected temporary sobriety into Andrew. He’s steady, and quiet, and he marches them to a side door and up a slender metal staircase.

They clamber onto the roof, Andrew first, and as they’re drawn all the way out towards the edge, music pounds beneath them, buzzing in Neil’s feet.

It’s terribly loud and brutally cold, the lineup for Eden’s Twilight winds down the street, and the city lights wave at the stars. It all hits him like the spray from a hose, and when he looks at Andrew peering off the side, it’s like another, warmer douse of something.

“Why here?” Neil asks.

Andrew ignores him. “Are you going to tell me what big bad wolf was in that crowd?”

“Does that make me little red?” Neil deflects, amused.

Andrew bows his head as if to say ‘obviously’.

He shrugs. Exhales and watches his breath. “None of your business.”

“You are my business.”

It’s true, in a way, Neil thinks. Andrew seems to collect everyone’s fears and wishes and grievances and add them to some algorithm that no one else can see or understand.

“It was someone who would’ve disposed of my body in a creative way, if given the chance,” he chooses to say. “I’ve seen him do it,” he adds quietly, less planned.

Andrew looks up at him. His jaw is clenched, almost like he’s afraid. “Now why would you know someone like that?”

“I wouldn’t say I know him,” Neil deflects. “We weren’t drinking buddies or anything.”

“Tell me next time someone is after you. We have a deal,” Andrew says.

“Right. Our deal. How exactly do you intend to fight a former convict who’s twice your size, again?”

He shouldn’t have said it. His feet rip from the ground like pulled roots, and the rooftop careens towards him. Andrew takes him to the ground all at once, a blink of a thing, standing — then sprawled and pinned. Neil’s breath jackknifes, and he can feel the familiar sting of a blade pressed between his ribs when they expand.

“Cheat,” Andrew says simply. He looks down at Neil hazily, pressing the knife in hard enough that he’s probably nicked through his shirt. Neil makes a confused noise, not really pain, and Andrew removes all pressure at once.

He sits up, feeling warm and tousled, and watches Andrew wander a few feet off, patting methodically for something in one of his pockets. He produces a joint, then walks downwind of Neil to light it. He tilts his head back into the wind after he takes his first hit, and the smoke is immediately snatched away.

He looks back at where he’s left Neil dazed on the ground. The music from the club below is in his tailbone and palms and splayed thighs now. Andrew’s eyes move over him deliberately, painstakingly, and he extends the joint in his direction.

Neil stands, in pieces, trying to get his weak legs beneath him. Andrew meets him halfway, and their cold-chapped fingers slot momentarily so he can pluck the joint free. He takes a pull of piney, acrid smoke, then another, and everything starts to wind down pleasantly.

Andrew leans forward to take a hit from where the weed is still propped up in Neil’s hand, fire and paper and fingers and lips, all in a row. He inhales as Andrew does.

“I didn’t want to run,” Neil blurts.

Andrew turns dark, narrow eyes on him, and he has that look on his face again, like he’s smiling against his will. “Is that supposed to be growth? Do you want a round of applause?”

“I just wanted you to know,” Neil says, ignoring him, “that I didn’t want to leave you.” He has no idea why he says it. He’s not even really high yet, the smoke is still creaking in his lungs.

Andrew’s eyes flicker between his. “Who’s after you?” he asks quietly, like he’s talking to himself. Neil shakes his head. Andrew leans down to smoke again, and he holds Neil’s hand in place as he does it. “They won’t get you,” he promises.

Neil closes his eyes. “Don’t say that.” Hope is so deadly, such a short-lived pleasure, so ugly when it rots.

Andrew shrugs, apparently noncommittal. “Have you known me to lie?”

“I don’t think you’re lying, I think you’re underestimating this threat.” But even as he says it, he knows it’s not true. Andrew has easily incapacitated him more than once. He keeps knives on his person and secrets behind his eyes, and held him down so forcefully when they met that he thought his wrists might crush like pop cans.

“You think too highly of your demons.”

Neil snorts. “I don’t think that’s the problem.”

“No? Then why are you so afraid to tell me who they are.”

“It’s not fear, it’s self-preservation.”

“Same thing,” Andrew says fiercely. Neil’s eyes narrow.

“Just—give me time. I want to see if I can be one of you before I start dragging my past all over everything.”

“If you think you’re keeping your past out now, you’re fooling yourself. Everything you do is to avoid a threat. You walk like someone’s behind you with a whip.”

“I didn’t realize you were watching so closely.”

Andrew falters, barely. Maybe it’s the drugs, that make his mouth go loose and drips his eyes down to the ground. “You’re obvious,” he says dismissively, and that’s when Neil really knows he’s hiding something.

“Fine,” Neil says. “Then trade me another truth. The man I just ran away from for why you wear those armbands.”

“I don’t want your truth,” Andrew says. “Come up with something better.”

“Fine,” Neil says again, frustrated. “But you’re interested in a trade?”

Andrew looks away from him, out towards the sound of popcorn laughter and the rows of lights that look like some strange, twinkling harvest. “Yes,” Andrew says clearly. He looks back, squarely in Neil’s face this time. “I’m interested.”

 

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

Their first show goes badly. 

They don’t practice for long enough, just two weeks of lyric reworking and transposition, Neil trying to bring his technique back from the dead, Kevin spitting and tearing his hair out.

They find themselves onstage like a machine with five separate motors and all the bolts loose. Andrew watches the way Neil’s shoulders turn into water when the stage lights hit him, the seam of dark hair that splits his scalp becoming a winding red river. 

It’s the stupidest thing, how he looks copy and pasted out of history, a magazine rocker back from when that meant something dangerous.

Kevin plays over top of Neil’s vocals. Bouncy bass lines that spit like oil in a pan, so out of place that Aaron stops playing, confused. Neil sings louder and his voice strains and pulls apart so you can see the tendons in it.

The audience screams and whispers, they’re not sure if Neil is here to stay, they don’t know what it would mean if he did.  _Do I stop buying their albums?_  They murmur.  _Is this them selling out? Mainstream, pretty vocalist on top of their band like a wedding cake topper?_

And then closer to the stage, tuned in, pupils swollen, Neil’s voice speaks to some of them like an open fire, turns their faces red, opens them up.

Andrew watches them with a kind of gratification, though he’s not sure if he’s thinking of the band’s success or the way he feels the same draw as them, warming his hands on something as nuclear as Neil.

They slice the end off of their set. They can’t get their sound all the way together, even when the 50 fans they’d really reached shout for an encore. The rest of the venue leaves in ecstasies of conversation: w _ho is he? Who is he? Who is he?_

Or maybe that’s the sound of Andrew’s furious thoughts, drowning it all out.

Or maybe it’s the mushrooms he took before the show. It’s the kind of high that pries everything apart and make him feel like he wouldn’t be able to hide even if all the lights were off, even if he had a hand clapped over his mouth.

Neil spins and starts to gather his microphone cord, preoccupied. Kevin puts his bass down carefully in its stand and shoots whiskey out of the bottle. He always makes the same face after, like it only hurts narrowly less than it helps.

“What the fuck was that?” he asks.

“Yeah, what was it?” Neil returns, like he was waiting for it. The house lights are on now, and all the sweat that made him look waxy and feverish as if by candlelight is now dark on his t-shirt and slick as grease in his hair. “You forget what dynamics are supposed to sound like?”

“I was trying to compensate for your horrifying lack of skill and professionalism,” Kevin says.

“Oh yeah? So you thought you’d play badly enough to drown me out? Interesting tactic.”

Kevin steps closer and Nicky stands in between them, guitar jutting out like a gate. “Kev,” he says lowly. “We’re still getting it together. No one thought our first show was going to be groundbreaking.”

“Then why did we bother having it?” he snaps.

“Practice,” Andrew says. “Like everything else.”

“Yeah, hey, I’ve heard it makes perfect,” Nicky jokes nervously.

“That’s not fair to the audience,” Kevin says. “We can’t be figuring our shit out on the stage they paid  _money_  to—“

“Oh, but it was your fault, wasn’t it Kevin. Let’s be honest,” Andrew says. “You decided Neil was going to fail before we stepped foot on stage, and then you made sure of it.”

Kevin looks gobsmacked, and Andrew hears Aaron muffle a laugh. Neil looks back and forth between them, strung between surprise and suspicion.

“I didn’t—“ Kevin stops, puts a steadying hand on his stool. “I wouldn’t sabotage our set to—what—prove a point?”

“Because you’re above that kind of thing,” Neil says sarcastically. “Except that your playing is always going to come before other people though, right?” He seems to realize halfway through speaking that he respects this quality in Kevin, and his voice softens.

Kevin doesn’t answer, but his eyes are needly. “So you’ve all decided to pin this on me?” He’s looking at Andrew.

“Sure have,” he replies cheerily. “Don’t do it again, hm?”

Kevin swallows and thumbs the tuning pegs on his bass, upset. “I fucking hate you when you’re high.”

“Are we supposed to believe he’s the love of your life when he’s sober?” Aaron asks flatly. Kevin’s opens his mouth, teeth bared like he’s going to reply, but instead he shoves a sheaf of notes and music off of his stand and storms offstage. Andrew watches the paper flutter to the floor.

“I didn’t need your protection,” Neil says.

“So you keep saying,” Andrew says, and then he follows Kevin to the bar.

______

Neil comes up when you google him, now.

Wymack released a clipped statement on behalf of Palmetto that Neil is the fifth member of Ausreißer and that yes, they know it’s unorthodox to change the line up halfway through a tour, but they’re excited to be working closely together on new music. He runs it by the band before turning it over to the press, and Neil frowns all the way through it.

They do a handful more shows on the east coast where Neil and Kevin don’t look at each other. The audience swells, curious or infatuated with the singer whose voice lays on top of the instrumentation like oil on water.

Neil has a wicked panic attack in the motel bathroom when Nicky shows him his wikipedia page, no picture or credits, just a line of text that links him undeniably to the rest of the monsters. He starts wheezing, then falling, and Andrew squeezes the back of his neck and tells him over and over again to come back to himself and cut it out. 

Nicky stands with his hand over his mouth and tears in his eyes until Neil gasps and breathes deeply.

At a show in New York, Neil starts experimenting, playing with the audience, his presence taking up so much of the stage that the air starts to feel thin and hard to come by. He’s still a little high from the afternoon edibles they took, and his voice is throaty and loose. 

He makes a bad joke about Kevin’s tattoo, something about his solos being like labyrinths, and Kevin grins, does an open slide down the fretboard that might as well be a  _thank you_. When music is their primary language, they never fight.

Neil’s all over the stage, twitching with music, eyes closed. Nicky takes his hands off his guitar to spin Neil into his body and then out again, and the momentum sends him over to the drum kit.

He sings into Andrew’s microphone, silver tongue, yellow hair long enough to stick to his cheekbones. For a moment, he wants him so completely that it makes his drumsticks tangle, a few beats bunching together like a clot in the rhythm. Neil’s eyes open, right next to him, car crash blue.

Andrew doesn’t look away, and in his head, pieces of lyrics start to hatch, bloody. Inspiration never used to come as easily or painfully as this, like Neil took a screwdriver directly to his brain and pried the words out.

Neil drifts away again, singing about not wanting to be seen, singing about the way staying alive is different from being alive. He always speaks Andrew’s lyrics like they’re just now occurring to him, and it makes him almost jealous.

He spends more time on stage than off. His talent loosens and rolls out like well-worked dough, voice going so relaxed and syrupy that it seems almost involuntary.

Halfway through one of their sets he sits in the middle of the stage, in a snake pit of wires, and sings clunky hard rock like a ballad. The rest of the band and the audience all crane towards him, listening for him like a pulse.

In private, they eat burger king in the van, Aaron dips fries in the zesty sauce that’s meant for onion rings, Kevin plucks at a guitar to hone his skill on a broader fretboard, and Nicky squats outside the open driver’s side door and tries to beckon a street cat into his lap.

Andrew lights a cigarette and wonders if Neil is aware of how he arches into the smoke like it’s fresh air.

“What are you doing?” Neil asks, leaning over the seat between them to look at Andrew’s open notebook, the cigarette between his fingers instead of a pen.

“Writing.”

Neil looks sceptical. “Lyrics?”

“The great American novel,” Andrew says sarcastically.

“Read it to me,” Neil challenges.

“You  _are_  bored,” he says. A side effect of his increasing comfort on stage is a dullness everywhere else.

“I’m trapped constantly in a van with shitty company.”

“Great, this can be your stop, then,” Aaron says, waving a fry in Neil’s direction. There’s almost no heat though. They all know that it’s too late to cut Neil out without surgical intervention.

“I’m great company,” Nicky says in-between kissy noises. The cat has wandered almost close enough to touch. “And I’m squandered on you.”

“When we get back to Columbia, I’m getting a hotel room,” Neil says.

“With what money?” Aaron mutters under his breath.

“The secret rolls of cash in his socks, probably,” Andrew says. Neil glares.

“Well anyway, you can’t,” Nicky says. “We’re supposed to play nice with the illustrious  _Foxes_  while we’re home, and we need to keep tabs on you.”

Neil looks surprised for a fraction of a second, but his expression settles quickly back into annoyance. “Hotels have phones.”

“The house is close to the studio,” Kevin points out. “I don’t give a fuck about what you do with your spare time, but we still have work to do.”

“And dinner. At Abby’s. The whole Palmetto family,” Nicky interjects.

“Is that—“ Neil wrestles with words for a second, coming up with dirty hands and not much else. “Normal?”

“Not really,” Nicky shrugs. “But this isn’t an average label. Wymack basically hand picked all of us. We’re kind of—“

“Don’t say misfits,” Aaron interrupts.

“Misfits,” Nicky finishes, with relish. “But he had the good sense to separate the pop from the rock and roll. We don’t exactly lead compatible lifestyles. I still think we should’ve gotten Renee, though.”

“We don’t need two drummers,” Kevin says sourly.

“She plays violin too,” Andrew says. “We could have swapped out a guitar.”

“You’d sell out your own family?” Nicky says, faux hurt. Andrew gives him a blank look.

“We don’t have the right sound for violin,” Neil says. “We’d eat her alive.”

Nicky’s gotten ahold of the cat now, a smudgy grey thing, and it’s grappling up his shoulder with its claws. Andrew watches the way Nicky lets it slice him to pieces just for the feeling of something in his arms. “Yeah right,” he says. “You haven’t met her.”

______

He meets her—and everyone else—a week later. Andrew starts drinking at noon just to prepare himself for the spectacle of it, the way Abby’s house will inevitably suck Neil in just like the stage did.

They’re all dishevelled when they stagger up the path to her front door, and the blinds are pulled but Andrew can see the yellow living room light and hear the roll of laughter from inside. His stomach sinks.

Neil picks his way across the grass behind him, hands shoved deep into his pockets. His shoulders are up by his ears and his feet drag. Nicky passes a flask down the line and they each take a generous swig. Kevin raps at the door, and it swings inward almost immediately.

It’s Wymack, an over-full tumbler in his hand and sweat peppering his hairline. Andrew’s willing to bet that he was watching for them, on the outskirts of socializing, trying to keep an equilibrium between his Foxes and his Monsters.

“About time,” Wymack says. His gaze finds the flask that ended up with Neil at the back of the line. He rolls his eyes. “You all planning on being civil tonight?”

“Whatever do you mean?” Andrew asks, pushing past both Wymack and Kevin to get to the warmth of the foyer.

“Shoes off,” Abby calls from somewhere in the bustle spilling out of the kitchen.

“The liquor cabinet’s locked,” Wymack leans over to tell him surreptitiously.

“Like that’s ever stopped him,” Aaron scoffs.

“It better,” he warns. He looks at Neil again. “How you doin’, kid?” Neil nods noncommittally. “They pushing you around?”

“Trying,” Nicky says, smiling. “He won’t budge.”

“Good.” He reaches out as if to cuff his shoulder but Neil flinches away.

Andrew feels something in his chest, a sliver of rib or a ventricle wriggle away and dissolve. He pulls Neil away without thinking, just a brisk tug and a release. Wymack’s already looking away, but Nicky’s watching Andrew, mouth quirked.

“Hey,” someone calls. Matt, it turns out, tall and irritatingly affable as always, hair slicked almost vertical. He nods at the group, but beams and holds his hand out to Neil, who separates from Andrew to shake it. “Matt Boyd, guitarist for Foxes. You’re Neil, right?”

“Yeah,” Neil says. “Vocalist.”

“Man, finally,” Matt says. “I really thought they’d never find a guy. But anyone who’s survived the monsters this long has already impressed me.”

Neil shrugs keeping his eyes carefully forward. “They’re interesting.”

“Oof,” Matt says. “That’s one way to put it. No offence Nicky.”

Nicky shrugs. “Nah, I know what we are.”

“You gotta meet the girls,” Matt says, guiding Neil towards the kitchen. “Dan keeps trying to mother you and she hasn’t even met you.”

Neil looks uncomfortable, glancing back towards the band, but they’re all scattering, preoccupied with food and dishes, or talking shop with a reluctant Wymack, in Kevin’s case. Andrew moves silently with Neil, fingers numb from the booze.

The kitchen is loud, buzzing with fluorescents and conversation. Dan’s sitting on the counter, and it’s almost funny, the way her mouth hitches wickedly when she spots Neil, then deflates when she sees Andrew. Matt slips an arm around her waist, and she seems to find an emotional middle ground.

“Neil Josten,” Dan greets. “We’ve been talking about you all month.”

“Is that supposed to flatter me?”

“Your choice,” she says, grinning. “I didn’t tell you what we were saying.”

“Hello Neil. Hi Andrew,” Renee says sweetly, waving.

“Renee,” he says. It’s a relief to see her. Her face is even as snow.

“By the way, I’m Dan. Wilds. I dunno if you’ve heard our stuff? I never wanna assume.”

Neil nods. “A little. You’re the lead singer?”

“Also on keys, on a good day. This is Renee Walker—she fuckin’ ruins on drums. Allison Reynolds, our badass bassist. And you met our guitarist,” she says, leaning up to press her smile into Matt’s jaw.

“‘From the Top’ is a good track,” Neil compliments stiffly. Andrew can tell from his awkward, twisting hands that it’s the only title he remembers.

They all cluck and groan, and Renee laughs, “it’s always that song. Really not our best.”

“It blows,” Dan agrees. “They play it at last call when they want to clear the place out.”

“Oh, they’re self aware,” Andrew says, quietly enough that only Neil seems to hear. His mouth twists a little meanly.

“So you sing,” Allison interjects, stepping close enough to toy with Neil’s collar, but he seems unfazed.

“Apparently.”

“In the middle of all that noise?” she asks, looking meaningfully at Andrew.

“I manage,” Neil says wryly.

“She’s just used to being the most grating thing in a room,” Andrew drawls.

Allison looks at him sharply. “So are you sober or what, monster? We going to have to lock up the knives?”

“Only if you’re stupid enough to think that I’m not carrying any.”

“Not stupid,” Dan says tiredly, “hopeful.”

“Naive,” he corrects. He’s feeling a little separate from his body. If Neil weren’t so caught up in this orbit, he’s pretty sure he could rope him into hotboxing the bathroom.

“Seriously Neil, are you juggling all of this okay?” Matt says, forehead creased like some sort of caricature of concern. Andrew was right, of course. They’ve only just met Neil and already they’re preoccupied, worried, slicing off parts of their lives to offer him. “It’s a hell of a thing to jump into all at once.”

“I’m fine,” Neil says. “I’ve jumped into much worse.”

Matt scoffs. “I guess that’s fair enough. Let us know if you need a little stability, okay?”

“I can handle myself,” Neil says, eyes flinty, and Andrew almost believes him. He keeps insisting that he’s on top of things, even when that mask of his is oozing blood and history. “But to be perfectly clear, I wanted to be a part of Ausreißer the second I heard them play, and that hasn’t changed. At all.”

Andrew chews and swallows this. His heart lifts, involuntary, and he has to go through the whole production of catching and strangling it like a bird.

“He’s one of them,” Allison says dramatically. “It’s too late.”

Dan rolls her eyes, but smiles at Neil. “That’s great, Neil. They’re a hell of a band, I won’t fight you on that.”

“For real,” Matt agrees. “If Kevin wasn’t such a raging asshole I would pretty much pay to jam with him. Don’t tell him I said that.”

“Doubt he would hear me from inside his own ass,” Neil says.

Matt’s smile brightens. “Love  _that_  attitude. Can we borrow him?”

“Good luck keeping hold of him,” Nicky says from behind them. “He’s slippery. Right babe?” He squeezes Neil’s cheeks and gets his hand slapped away.

“But you like ‘em slippery, right Nick?” Allison says.

“Guilty. And I’m not the only one,” he says, and Andrew sends Nicky a warning look just as he glances meaningfully in his direction. Renee looks between them curiously.

“Well,” Matt says. “I’m fucking hungry. Anyone else feel like they haven’t had a home-cooked meal in a hundred years?”

“God, yes,” Dan says. “All they ever give me to eat are salads with half a teaspoon of oil or lemon juice or whatever.”

“Vinaigrette,” Allison corrects.

“Vinai- _shit_. I need something so greasy that it makes me sweat.”

“Matt’s right there,” Allison says, and Matt flicks her in the neck.

They bicker amongst themselves until Abby ducks her head in to tell them it’s time to eat. “Go ahead and serve yourselves, okay? And there’s, uh, cider in the fridge. No hard stuff until you’ve all eaten.”

“Thanks mom,” Dan jokes.

“Oh, please, I might as well be,” she replies, waving her off.

“Does that make Wymack our dad?” Matt asks slyly, obviously fishing. Abby gives him an unimpressed look and bobs back out of the room without answering.

“Come on monsters, new and old. Lets pretend we can stand each other sober,” Allison says, pushing off the counter.

They filter out, and Andrew hears Nicky say, disbelieving, “you guys are  _sober_?”

Neil lingers in the kitchen, so Andrew leans up against the doorframe and waits.

“You can go,” he says.

“Yes,” Andrew agrees.

Neil’s shoulders sag, and he covers his face with one hand. “I can’t remember the last time I—socialized.” It’s an unexpected piece of honesty, and Andrew purses his lips.

“It shows.”

Neil looks up, disbelieving. “What, do you think you’re the paragon of small talk?” He tilts his head, scrutinizing, and answers himself— “No. Too much like lying, right?”

“Ding ding ding,” Andrew says. “He misses nothing.”

“I can’t usually afford to.”

Andrew stares. Neil looks back, looking a little clammy, a little hyper-focused. “Or what? Something gives you one of those scars?”

“Did something give  _you_  scars?” Neil counters, nodding at his arms.

“Mm, no, still not a good enough trade.”

“Then I’m still waiting,” Neil says lowly, “for you to tell me what is.”

Andrew stares at a crack in the ceramic backsplash, feeling Neil’s gaze rove over his face. 

He suffers through it for an entire ten-count, then turns wordlessly into the dining room. Neil follows immediately, before Andrew can catch his breath.

The room is full, the usual healthy dose of tension curdling in the joy that people like Nicky and Renee and Abby can’t seem to help spilling everywhere. Andrew sits at the head of the table, and Kevin settles at his right hand. He nudges out the seat to his left with his foot, and Neil sits in it wordlessly.

Renee bows her head in prayer. Nicky reaches for a ladle full of potatoes and Andrew yanks his hand back until Renee smiles and waves them ahead.

“So Neil,” Abby starts.

“Don’t put him on the spot too badly,” Dan says, licking sauce off of her thumb and reaching for the iced tea. “We’ve done enough of that already.”

Abby raises her hands innocently. “I was just going to ask how long he’s been singing.”

Neil appears pristinely composed, accepting everything that’s passed to him. Every expression moves across his face like it’s designed to look like a certain emotion, one mask in a series. “As long as I can remember,” he says thinly. “When I had the chance.”

“Any professional training?” Her face is mild and pleasant, and it sets Andrew’s teeth on edge.

“He’s an amateur,” Kevin answers for him.

“More of a natural talent,” Nicky says warmly, winking at Neil.

“I see,” Abby says slowly. “How did you… I mean, how did the boys find you, exactly?”

“He was trying to steal from us,” Andrew says. Neil looks at him narrowly.

Matt guffaws. “What could they possibly have had that you wanted?”

Neil shrugs with one shoulder. “Whiskey.”

Matt laughs again. Wymack rolls his eyes. “They conveniently left that part out when they were pitching him to me.”

“Would it have made a difference?” Andrew asks.

“No,” Wymack replies easily. “But I would’ve double checked my locks.”

“I’ve never stolen unless it was absolutely necessary,” Neil says woodenly.

“Right, so with the whiskey you were what? Dehydrated?” Allison says.

“Ease off, Allison,” Dan warns.

“Broke. Homeless,” Neil replies, sipping water, pretending not to notice that he’s the stone causing all the ripples of stress in the room. “But it wasn’t really worth the guitar to the stomach, in the end.”

A wince shudders around the table, and Wymack squints in Andrew’s direction.

“Wasn’t it?” Andrew asks, thinking of the way Neil’s head had eased back when he pinned him to the ground, bright interest in his slitted eyes. “We gave you your stage. You’re halfway to a household name by now.”

He says it because he knows, he can tell, what that visibility is doing to Neil. There’s always a second, before he loses himself onstage, that he scans the crowd for something, and his face is unrecognizable with fear.

Those eyes find him again. “So you want me to thank you for the smashed ribs? Should I be thanking Kevin for the bruised windpipe too?”

“Would you?” Andrew says, faux sweet.

“Jesus, Andrew,” Matt says.

“Thank you,” Neil tells him, eyes dark, almost hollow. “Really. It’s almost like being at home again.”

He stares.  _There are people in Baltimore who want me dead_. That’s what Neil had told him about his  _home_. He’d torn out of the van like it was filling up with water when he woke up in Annapolis.

The look on his face was unforgettable. His panic was like a corpse thrashing with electricity, like someone had tried to animate a dead thing.

He can remember staring at the little brass  _Spears_  written in cursive over the mailbox, facing the slate grey front door, never knowing whether he would open it to find a home or a nightmare. He’s since realized that they can be precisely the same thing at precisely the same time, tempting as a hearth until someone holds your hands in the fire.

“Andrew,” Renee says, coaxing his gaze away from Neil, away from the whole smouldering pile of memory and obsession. She’s smiling gently. “Do you want some gravy?”

He nods slowly. Neil’s focus is on his food now, and Dan’s talking earnestly to Wymack. Dinner trundles on.

They bring out dessert before all of the main course is cleared away, and he eats the maraschino cherries first, licking syrup off of his fingers, then dissecting graham crumbs and whipped cream from the filling. He stares down at the creased, recently frozen base, the middle breaking apart without a foundation, the off-white cream.

He splits the crust in half and reassembles the cake as a sandwich. Dan wrinkles her nose at the mess. Neil folds his cherry into his napkin distastefully. Andrew suddenly craves a cigarette more than sugar, and even more than that he needs a way to get his thoughts out.

He stands, and ignores the way everyone lets their conversations go to look up expectantly. He brushes past the table, through the living room, and out the front door. 

The screen clatters behind him, and he lights up immediately, flicking ash at the porch when it withers in the wind. He thinks of Neil guessing, without trying, that small talk is a lie Andrew refuses to take part in. He hates him so viciously that he can feel it showing on his face.

He digs in his back pocket for a notepad and stubby pencil, breathing sour, woody nicotine.

_pipe dream_ , he writes.  _pipe dream, pipe dream_. He rips the sheet out and tears it to soggy pieces with his teeth. Then he writes:

 

_I can always taste_

_salt and copper when I’m dreaming_

_took a pipe to my head,_

_but you’re the one who’s bleeding_

_breaking crime scene tape_

_to open the front door_

_invisible monsters_

_no one fights anymore_

_lying like a mouth on fire_

_we’ll go up in smoke if we get any higher_

_Salt and copper cocktails_

_rim the glasses red_

_better off dying than already dead_

_drink yourself home, the sting might kill you_

_pare back your skin, make it grow back new_

_just because you set my bones, doesn’t mean you own them_

_it’s never flower bouquets, always fists full of stems_

_you’ll have to kill me_

_if you cut me from this ground._

He puts the notepad upside down on the top step and grinds his boot into its spine. Then he paces down the front path and crouches in the grass, and when he puts his cigarette out in the frost, the fresh, cold air makes his chest seize.

He looks down at the ‘no’ tattooed on his hand, and he lets the word blur into a mantra in his head.

“What’s this?”

He wheels around, and finds Nicky leaning over the top step with his squashed book in his hands.

“Put it down,” Andrew says, moving quickly back up the path, watching Nicky’s eyes dart over the page and feeling his legs go rod-straight with anxiety.

“Oh, Andrew—“

“Put it down,” he repeats, “or I put you in the hospital.”

Nicky’s grip sags, and he struggles to stand upright. “You can’t just—are you honestly going to pretend this isn’t about him?”

He doesn’t reply, but he swipes for the book hard enough that he raises a pale line on the back of Nicky’s hand. He throws it to the side, out towards his parked car, and takes Nicky to the front door with a forearm braced at his throat.

“Fuck, Andrew, you can’t be serious,” he struggles to say.

Andrew starts to shake, rage and fear rising in him at once, twin tides.

“You’re writing songs about him?”

“I wrote lyrics for our new vocalist,” Andrew snaps, “because you requested it.”

“Not for him.  _About_  him,” Nicky says, a veil of sadness over his whole face. Andrew shakes him. “But Andrew, I don’t think he’s—“

“I don’t care,” he grits.

Nicky looks uneasy. “I think you do.”

“I didn’t ask for an opinion.” He hammers the flat of his wrist into Nicky’s neck, somewhere between a shove and a blow, then lets him go all at once. He sags into the doorframe, apparently more stunned than hurt.

“I’m sorry,” Nicky wheezes, and Andrew knows he’s not talking about the unsolicited advice or invaded privacy.

Neil’s face appears at the hall window, reacting to the noise of a scuffle before anyone else. His expression is difficult to parse, poised like a pen and furrowed like paper.

Andrew climbs down from the porch, gets into his car, and drives away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cool I love andrew's internal anguish but I love feedback even more heyo


	5. Chapter 5

Neil tilts a record out of the stacks, and the sun catches the sleek surface and shows him his reflection.

“You’re not even in the right section,” Kevin calls. He’s two rows away flipping through rock-punk CDs, looking exhilarated when they fall towards him like dominoes.

The whole store is no bigger than a spacious bedroom, and the shop front is all boxy windows, letting in honeycombs of late-afternoon light. Kevin’s never looked so relaxed, dragging his fingers along the spines of albums, inspecting the equipment behind the till, smiling and chatting with the owner.

“There is no right section,” he mutters, sliding the album back into its slot. “It’s all music.”

“Right,” Kevin says. Neil glances up and finds him unexpectedly close, mouth pursed reluctantly with amusement. “Except we’re not here for  _all music_.”

“What are we actually here for again?” Neil asks, distracted. He can see Andrew waiting outside with his back to them and his arms crossed, serious and stock-still as a bodyguard.

“Inspiration.”

Neil watches Kevin’s face. The crease that’s usually between his brows is only suggestion now, a slouchy, un-tensed line. He’s tolerable like this, Neil thinks, almost impressive, choosing music to feed his creativity.

“You love it here,” Neil accuses. “This is a vacation for you.”

Kevin scoffs. “Like you’re not the same.”

Neil shrugs. There’s an upright piano on the wall and he wants to squeeze the keys in his hands like fingers in a crowd. The sound of voices and tires on asphalt from outside spreads like frosting over the crumbling drumbeat from the stereo. The rusting brown of the wallpaper behind the counter looks almost orange with the full force of the sun on it.

He could live and die in a place like this, head down, hands full of bright new music and dark classics, never in silence, never alone.

"Come look at this,” Kevin says. Neil follows him to the far corner of the shop where there are picked-over alternative CDs and peeling tape labels. He plucks an album from the stack and wiggles it at Neil. “Old school Ausreißer.”

Neil squints at the cover art. “You look like a bad metal band.” The original four are caught in the middle of a set, dressed in all black under a red spotlight, mid-howl. The word Ausreißer is so stylized that it’s almost illegible.

Kevin rolls his eyes and puts the CD back in its slot. “Things change. When we found you you looked like you were on day ten of a bender.”

“I can go back to that, if it’s the look you’re going for. Wouldn’t want to stand out in a band full of junkies and burnouts.”

“Funny,” Kevin says flatly. “Just bring that smart mouth to song writing.” He gathers his little stack of music and a clear box of sturdy picks, and drops them on the front counter to be checked out.

Neil hesitates, swaddled in the darkest, warmest corner of the store, reluctant to splash back out into the cold. He can already see how it will play out: Andrew’s silence and Kevin’s focus, the way they take up so much of the sidewalk that Neil has to fall in behind them or walk in the gutter, the drive home like a never-ending commute to nowhere at all.

He’s listless without a stage, and Kevin won’t let him forget that he’s not a natural born songwriter. He’s waiting for inspiration like that second raindrop after you swear you felt the first one.

His eyes wander and catch on a lurid red flier stapled to the bulletin board above the stacks, and he does a double-take.  _Foxes. Township Auditorium. Friday, January 25th._

“Dan’s group is playing this Friday?” Neil wonders aloud, and Kevin looks at him over his shoulder, handing bills off to the cashier.

“Oh yeah, the Township gig. I think they’re hanging out in town for a week or so, too.”

“We should go.” He thinks of the way the girls had laughed about their public personas and plastic recognition. He wants to hear them for real, as magnetic and driven as they were at Abby’s, assuring him that they do pop like he’s never heard in his life.

“Waste of time,” Kevin says, accepting his bag with one of his frozen, ken doll smiles and making towards the exit.

“We’re not touring right now,” Neil argues, catching up. “We can take two hours off from the new album.”

“We can,” Kevin says, “but we shouldn’t.”

“And yet you find the time to drink six hours a day.”

“The creative process looks different on everyone,” he grits. They push out into the sunlight and Andrew looks vaguely in their direction, his face chapped from the wind.

“Great. Mine looks like going to local concerts and supporting our label, and you know full fucking well that Wymack would agree with me.” They start walking, Neil leading them in a frantic triangle down main street. Andrew doesn’t ask or care about what they’re arguing over, which is why Neil tells him, “I want to go to the Foxes concert on Friday.”

“Then go,” he says. He’d been chain-smoking while Neil and Kevin were in the shop, and he looks irritable and sick. His pallor has been almost bruised lately, like something’s wringing him out and leaving marks behind.

Neil flips Kevin off and walks further ahead of the group, buoyed by the opportunity to be part of an audience again. He loves the silky anonymity and sway of the crowd almost as much as being doused in lights and held up by a mic stand.

Kevin’s still talking about accountability and wasted talent, but he’s lost his audience.

Neil reaches the van first, parallel parked at a wicked angle. He waits for the muted click of the unlock button, then climbs into the passenger seat. There’s a parking ticket folded over the windshield wipers and Andrew sets them going so that it flutters down onto the street.

“It’s not going to be the same in the crowd as it is onstage,” Kevin says calmly from the backseat.

Neil turns his head. “I know.”

“The fans know who you are now, and I’m not sure you’re ready for what that actually looks like.”

“I’m pretty good at blending in,” Neil says, eyes narrowed.

“You’re not,” Andrew says, pulling jerkily out of the spot without looking and nearly catching a hyundai by the nose. “You’re loud.” Car horns blare on all sides like a chorus of agreement.

“You draw attention,” Kevin agrees grimly. “I’d rather you stick it out in the studio where you can’t get into trouble. And Wymack would agree with  _me_  about that.”

Neil watches pedestrians swarm and cars criss-cross beyond the window. “So what, I join a band and now I’m on full-time house arrest?”

“Shouldn’t you be used to keeping your head down, runaway?” Andrew taunts. His hands flash as he makes a left turn, ink spelling yes over no over yes. Neil gives him a look.

“You’re not talking about staying on the move, you’re talking about hiding. And in my experience, your problems catch up with you when you sit and wait for them to go away.”

“I’m not talking about your fucked up past,” Kevin says irritably. “If you want to stumble into the nearest concert, you can, but if you misrepresent us or pull some stupid shit to distract from the set, Wymack will kick your ass. If Dan doesn’t get there first.”

“Don’t worry Kevin,” Andrew says, glancing away from the road to fix Neil with a cool, knowing look. “He has  _winning_  impulse control. Right Neil?”

Neil clenches his teeth and ignores him. “I realize that you don’t trust me, but I need you to understand that I don’t care. I’m not going to stay in the cage until you figure out if you’re ready to unlock it or not. I’m not going to live that way anymore.”

“You’re on a team now, and you have to care,” Kevin argues.

Neil scoffs. “Tell that to Andrew.”

Kevin looks pained. “He’s—“

“What? An exception? I’d love to know why I’m held to a higher standard than the person with concealed weapons and an unreliable drug dependency,” Neil says, fuming. Andrew pumps the brakes so that Neil topples forward into the dashboard, then he’s thrown back again when they accelerate. He grips the headrest and seethes, “you’re fucking  _psychotic_.”

“You—“ Kevin starts.

“Kevin,” Andrew says, toneless, barely there, and Kevin stops short. Neil recognizes that easy power, that tongue-biting obedience.

They collapse into strained silence, Andrew looking infuriatingly tranquil, the air around Kevin vibrating with how badly he wants to speak.

Neil thinks about the corner of the music store and that old album, an Ausreißer from back when Neil was still lost in between hotel rooms, when his mother was alive, and she could change the course of his life with just the tips of her fingers. He thinks,  _things can be so easy and so ugly at the same time._

They get out at Palmetto, Neil wrenching doors closed behind him, trying to feel like he has a raft to himself for once, like he’s not always sharing, feeling for someone else’s shifting weight.

Nicky’s spread between two chairs when he gets to the studio, and Neil’s relieved to see the easy smile on his face. It fractures when he gets a good look at him.

“Oh no. Was it unbearable? I thought music shopping would mellow Kevin out, at least.”

“It was fine,” Neil says, rolling a chair towards the table where they left all of their notes and stray music. He sweeps everything off the table, feeling a vindictive shock when it all settles on the floor; every dangling idea, stagnating chord progression, and experimental piece of garbage.

“Yeah, you seem fine,” Nicky says sarcastically.

“Better,” Neil says, rummaging in the heaps of wasted work until his hand closes around a discarded pen. “I’m inspired.”

_____

The dye burns cold on his scalp. He paints the wispy place above his ears, and tucks it up into the rest of the gummy mess. There’s a dark streak on the porcelain of the sink, and he rubs it with one gloved finger.

Someone knocks at the door, and Neil reaches behind himself to open it. There’s a beat, and a flutter of movement, and then his eyes meet Andrew’s in the mirror. 

“Brown,” Andrew remarks.

“You wanted me to tone it down,” Neil says, focusing on smothering his auburn roots and pointedly ignoring the rest of his reflection.

“Don’t put Kevin’s words in my mouth.”

Neil meets his eyes again. “What do you want?”

Andrew doesn’t reply for a long moment, and then he starts to peel down his armbands. It’s like watching a snake shed its skin, and Neil’s so startled to see it happening that he turns around to watch him directly.

He’s expecting the thatch of scars, but it still knocks the wind out of him to see them, tender pinks and whites that nudge all the way up to the ink on his wrists and hands.

Andrew plucks the brush out of Neil’s limp hand and scoops up a mound of colour that looks black in the weak light.

“Head down.”

Neil complies, chin towards his chest, and feels Andrew smooth the dye from just below his ear up into the coil of loose, wet hair. He can feel the damp heat from Andrew’s bare wrists, smothered for most of the day.

“Who put you in a cage?” Andrew asks, and the hair on Neil’s neck stands up.

“What—“

“You said: I’m not going to stay in the cage until you figure out if you’re ready to unlock it. I’m not going to live that way anymore.” He says it robotically, like an automated recording.

“I know what I said,” Neil snaps, starting to look up, but Andrew grips his neck and steers his head down again.

“Then you should be able to explain what you meant. Without lying to me.”

Andrew’s initiating one of their trades, he realizes, baring a secret and nodding at Neil do to the same. He closes his eyes, flinching when the brush makes sudden contact with his neck.

“My mother.” It’s an easier answer than the reality--a web of injustice too thick to see through. A childhood spent escaping from one cell block to another. 

The brush stops midway through a glide towards his hairline. “She hurt you?” Andrew asks, low.

“It’s not that simple.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You know better than anyone that protecting someone can get bloody. Our circumstances weren’t--they were never good enough for us to have a decent relationship. But she kept us moving.”

A bare hand curls in his hair, and Neil’s eyes open. His breath catches when he recognizes the hateful look on Andrew’s face.

“Did she hit you, yes or no?”

Neil swallows thickly, trying to focus on the feeling of Andrew’s hand against his scalp. “Yes.” The hand tightens painfully. “But she’s dead now. My parents are dead.” He doesn’t know what drives him to say such a hasty, partial truth, like it has any bearing on the way it felt to be forced to the ground and pinned until his arm broke. Death gets rid of the person, not the memory. 

Andrew’s hand drops altogether. He moves into the space at Neil’s side, hip to hip, and rinses his hand under the tap. “If she was beating you, she wasn’t protecting you.”

“You don’t understand what people are capable of when they’re struggling to survive.”

Andrew steps slowly and lethally into Neil’s space. “Yes, I do,” he says, nearly whispering. Neil’s eyes hitch down to his destroyed wrists. 

He nods, and Andrew backs off. He feels a strange, remote disappointment watching him move away, like climbing out of a roller coaster and watching it take off without him.

“We’re not keeping you locked up,” Andrew says. “We do not own you.”

Neil shakes his head a little, running a hand over his hair under the guise of checking for dry patches, trying to reclaim the tingling, grounding feeling of Andrew’s fingers.

“Contractually, you do.”

“You’re with us,” Andrew says, “until the second someone abuses your contract, then you leave. We both know you could outrun me if you really wanted to.”

“Maybe,” Neil says, on the blunt edge of a smile. “But you might be able to outlast me.”

Andrew looks at him in the mirror for a long while. “You’re disgustingly stubborn,” he says. “And dense. I wouldn’t count on my ability to put up with you for that long.”

Neil shrugs. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. I won’t leave. We have a deal.”

“I just told you—“

“Not the contract. You and I have a deal. And I’m not ready to give it up,” Neil says, and he means it. The tenuous promise of protection, the give and take, the lure of the stage. He’s only grown more and more obsessed with the whole thing.

Andrew wavers. He reaches for his discarded armbands, and takes his time rolling them back up. Neil feels a painful rush of recognition at seeing his scars swallowed up, and he reaches out impulsively to hold him by the wrist. Andrew’s fingers are still ruddy with dye.

“This isn’t a cage. You’re nothing like—it’s nothing like my mother.”

At Abby’s, he’d told Andrew he reminded him of home, the most nightmarish insult he could lay his hands upon. And for a jarring second, Andrew’s commanding relationship with the band had looked like the dynamic between himself and his mother, ceaseless authority meeting senseless devotion. He’s been stupid enough to mistake Andrew’s promises for Mary Hatford’s threats.

At length, Andrew tugs, and Neil lets go of him.

Long after he’s gone, and Neil’s hair is washed out and limp, wet brown, he can still feel the raised scars underneath the fabric of the armband, and beneath that, a curiously rabbiting pulse.

______

_And “monster” does not begin_

_to cover bolts and stitches in my skin_

_sinew held with safety pins_

_but you made me_

_the creature not the man, right?_

_but this lab coat’s fitting pretty tight_

_and if you’re living out of spite_

_are you a person or a feeling,_

_and would it hurt to look at you directly?_

_gunshots speak louder than words_

_but the warning shots you heard_

_don’t work for people who’d prefer_

_to die than to live on their knees--_

“It needs workshopping,” Kevin says, tossing the notebook onto the coffee table.

“I think it’s great, Neil,” Nicky says. “The Frankenstein stuff is cool, our fans eat that shit up.”

Neil shrugs, and he gathers his notes back up from the table, out of reach from prying eyes. They’re assembled in a loose square in the living room, with Andrew at the window, a cigarette burning delicately between two fingers.

“You call yourselves the monsters so— I don’t know.”

“It works,” Kevin sniffs. “They’ll get it. They’ll like it.” It’s a more generous response than he was expecting, and he knows it’s the most approval Kevin can bring himself to show. “How soon can you match it musically?” he asks Andrew.

“I already have a melody,” Neil interrupts. He stands, walks over to the keyboard Kevin insists they always keep on hand, and presses the ‘on’ button. “It’s not very complex,” he says, walking his right hand over a couple of keys until the power catches up and the notes start to voice.

He plays the song through once, low arpeggiated chords and a sustained, high tenor line. He sings when he can’t help it, crooning until it gets too high to sing softly.

Out of the corner of his eye, he catches Andrew’s fingers drumming against the windowsill.

“You’re right,” Aaron says when it’s finished. “It’s not very complex.”

“Downer,” Nicky accuses. “It’s just keys right now, we can amp it up.”

“Is it worth it?” Aaron complains.

“Yes,” Andrew says, leaning over to put his cigarette out in the ashtray balanced on the arm of the couch. They all look at him expectantly, and he gets up, grabs the music directly out of Neil’s hands, and disappears into his room with it.

“Well that’s a good sign,” Nicky says, bemused. “Guess we’re going to that concert, Neil.” When Kevin opens his mouth to protest, Nicky says, “Wymack signed off on it. Plus we’re making headway on the b-side tracks, and Andrew’s actually working.”

“I’m not going,” Kevin says, crossing his arms.

“Me neither,” Aaron says. “Allison will have our balls if we pull focus from her.”

“So we won’t,” Nicky says. He ropes Neil in by the shoulder and tousles his newly dark hair. “No one will even know we’re there.”

______

Later, Nicky sends Neil to ask for the car keys, and he finds himself standing in the dusk outside Andrew’s room, delaying the inevitable confrontation.

Andrew comes out before he can knock, wearing boots and a black baseball cap, keys clenched in his fist. They nearly collide, and Neil staggers back a step. 

“You’re coming with us?” he asks dumbly.

“You and Nicky can’t be trusted alone,” he says. It’s an insult, but it hits Neil like warm water from a shower-head, like relief.

“Did Kevin ask you to do this?” Neil asks, but Andrew ignores him, brushing past into the living room, then the entryway. Nicky pushes off from the back of the couch where he’s been waiting, looking back and forth between the two of them nervously.

“We’re all going?”

“Apparently,” Neil replies.

“Cool. Weird. Shotgun.”

“Neil’s sitting in the front,” Andrew says, cranking the screen door open.

“Family really means, like, nothing to you when Neil’s around—“ Nicky’s saying as he follows Andrew out into the night.

Neil breathes out, lacing his shoes and listening to Nicky chatter circles around Andrew, who is steady and silent, already fixed in the driver’s seat.

He’s been picturing the Foxes concert as that same ambiguous darkness from before he joined the band, skulking in the back of bars and hoping to be caught. Now he imagines Andrew and Nicky propping him up like brackets, a drink he actually paid for, the hair-raising knowledge of what it feels like on the other side of the performance.

Wind shivers through the front door and underneath Neil’s collar. He jams his hands into his jacket pockets—the leather already stiff and unyielding from the cold—squares his shoulders, and opens the door.

______

They’re smuggled in through a door backstage, already late. Nicky clings to Neil’s sleeve so tightly that it pulls down over his hand. 

Renee comes to greet them, as unnervingly pleasant as the last time he’d seen her. Neil keeps expecting her even-keeled demeanour to clash against Andrew’s like icebergs meeting, but they only seem to thaw around one another. 

Andrew greets her, and she knocks her knuckles into his hand and smiles.

“I’m glad you guys came. Don’t tell her I told you, but Allison’s raring to show off.”

“I bet she is, competitive bitch,” Nicky says good-naturedly. “All you foxes are such a handful.”

Renee seems to be considering whether or not he’s joking when Dan appears at her elbow. “Walk in the park compared to your lot,” she says, smiling sharply. Her eyes flit to Neil and she softens. “Still doing okay, Neil?”

“She means, have we ruined your life,” Andrew says in German.

“Quick, tell her how saintly we are,” Nicky says.

“And lie?” Neil asks in exaggerated German, as if scandalized. “I’m fine,” he says to Dan. “Excited to see a Foxes set.” 

It’s a bigger venue than he’s used to, and the energy is intimidating, people whisking past them and calling instructions to one another.

Her smile quirks, and she lets her arm drape around Renee’s neck. “We’ll try our best to impress, then. As usual.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Nicky says. “You’re a big deal, we get it. Don’t you have warm-ups to do?”

Dan snorts. “Time off is making you a little mean, Hemmick. You better watch him, monster.”

Andrew stares blankly back at her, and Nicky says, “you try living with Kevin 24 hours a day and tell me how personable you’re feeling.”

Dan winces. “Point.” Someone ducks close and whispers in her ear, and her face flickers through several shades of confusion and annoyance. “Okay, shit. One of Allison’s pegs came loose and her tuning is all over the place. Sound check’s in five, and Matt’s on the wrong side of drunk, but um. The show must go on, I guess.”

Renee ducks out from under Dan’s arm, excusing herself, and Dan squeezes Neil’s shoulder in parting. “See you out there. Try not to get into trouble.”

“Yeah right,” Nicky says, and she aims a kick at his shin. He falls back a step, laughing, as she jogs after Renee. “Hey, rock and roll, Dan,” he calls. “Or whatever it is you guys do.”

He’s still beaming when he loops his arm with Neil’s and steers them towards the door. Neil looks anxiously back at Andrew, but he’s a step behind them as usual.

They wait for a lull in passersby, and then they’re out in the thick of the crowd, pushing conspicuously from the front of the stage to the side of the room. Eyes linger on them and narrow, and his throat starts to constrict until he feels Andrew’s hand thread into the shirt under his jacket, keeping him tethered.

Nicky can’t resist dancing a little to the opener, as obvious as they already are, and he bobs through the aisles, shooting furtive looks back at Neil to see if he’s enjoying himself. The band on stage is too high energy for their low energy song, jumping and twisting to a half-time rhythm. 

Andrew’s hand tightens at the small of his back, and Neil glances back to see him eyeing the thrashing drummer with distaste.

“I thought you didn’t care about technique,” Neil tells him over the music, and Andrew tears his eyes away. He’s frowning, and Neil relishes that off-guard little furrow of emotion.

“I don’t,” Andrew says, “I also don’t listen to bad music if I can help it.”

“Guess we must be pretty good, then,” Neil says.

“I didn’t say that.”

“No,” Neil agrees. “You didn’t.” He knows that it’s true, though. Somewhere past the layers and layers of bandages that Andrew wears, there must be raw flesh. It’s just that Neil can’t tell if he’s healing or rotting underneath it all.

They come to a stop close to the stairs up into the stands, and Nicky gestures at an empty patch halfway up. Most of the crowd is standing already, chaotic, but they climb up into the mess and find their seats, Nicky on the inside and Andrew in the aisle, with Neil sandwiched in-between.

“Our fans are louder,” Nicky leans over to say smugly.

“That’s because they’re trying to keep up with you,” Neil says. “Decibel for decibel.”

“Fuck you,” Nicky laughs. His eyes are bright, and he grips the seat in front of him to get the leverage to see through the masses.

They ride the energy of the crowd to the end of the song, and then the group is hollering goodbyes and filing offstage, and people start to sit down or escape to concession. Nicky relaxes back into his seat and pinches Neil for his opinion.

“I don’t think we missed much,” Neil says.

Nicky shrugs. “Yeah, but we were like that once. You got to skip Ausreißer’s adolescence, Neil, you lucky shit. It was not pretty.”

“Kevin showed me your first album,” he tells him.

“Oh, Jesus,” Nicky groans. “Those were dark times. I used to wear leather biker gloves on stage, like a tool.” He rustles in his inner jacket pocket and produces his flask. “Drink to forget?”

Andrew reaches across to pluck it from his hand before anyone can drink. He unscrews the cap and points it at Nicky. “I know you’re already fucked, Nicky.”

He scoffs, making a messy grab for it that Andrew dodges. “Hardly.”

Andrew swallows a generous shots worth, then passes the flask to Neil. This is familiar by now, sharing space and booze and drugs as a means to an end. They get drunk like they’re grappling down a cliff-face together, connected by rope.

Neil hesitates. There are strangers on all sides and the sick smell of sweat and beer in the air, but there’s something about his back to the wall and a concert ahead that he trusts. This is how he spent the years after his mother’s death, anonymous and drunk, losing control in measured doses like taking medication.

He drinks, the mouthpiece still wet from Andrew’s mouth, and screws his face up at the tartness of the flavour—a salty, lemony vodka. Nicky tries to steal the flask halfway through his sip, so Neil pushes him away by the face.

He and Andrew share the rest of the liquor, and he puts the back of his hand to his face to feel it warming up. It’s a relief, to feel his edges shaved off. It’s like he’s less defined this way, less likely to be recognized.

Stagehands are fiddling with amps onstage and taping wires down, and the buzz of the crowd is suddenly deafening.

“What’s the deal with Renee?” he hears himself asking.

“What d’you mean?” Nicky asks.

“You like her,” Neil guesses, jabbing Andrew with the base of the flask to get his attention. “But she’s nothing like you.”

“She’s one of us,” Andrew says.

“But she’s not, though,” Neil says, half-frustrated and half gawking at his own lack of composure. He wants his curiosity back inside where it can fester and wonder in circles and die. “I thought Wymack only took in strays. Charity cases.”

“You have met her twice,” Andrew says coldly. “How well do you think you can judge a person’s character in that time?”

“Pretty well,” Neil says grimly. He thinks of the cross around her neck and the prim lace of her collar, attention-grabbing hair offset by dark, serious eyes. He saw Matt’s track marks and Allison’s rage before Dan had even whispered their stories to him, but he can’t read anything on sweet, prim Renee.

“Lucky she doesn’t care what anyone thinks,” Nicky interjects. “She’s waiting to be judged by God, I think. Everyone else’s opinions are just… noise.”

He can’t imagine anyone who was really like them believing in God like that, but he bites his tongue.

“Little orphan Neil Josten gets in some trouble and he thinks he knows what rock bottom looks like,” Andrew muses, and Neil’s stomach sinks. “You haven’t even hit it yet.” He looks unfocused, and it occurs to Neil that he might have taken something before they left.

“You’re right,” Neil says. “But you promised that you’d be there when I do,” he reminds him. 

“What the fuck does that mean?” Nicky asks. “Neil?”

“Neil?” someone else says, and Neil looks over to see a woman and a couple of scruffy looking dudes frozen halfway up the stairs. His eyes drop to the shortest of the two, who’s wearing elbow-length armbands identical to Andrew’s. “Andrew! Nicky! Oh my god,” he says.

Nicky puts on a winning smile. “Hey!”

“I can’t believe you’re here—like, for real, there were rumours, but—oh my god— “

“He’s completely obsessed with you,” the woman gushes.

“Katie,” he hisses, and his friend shakes him good-naturedly by the shoulders.

“He’s afraid to say it, but—“

“Fuck  _off_ —“

“—every single album—“

“That’s very cute,” Nicky interrupts, cocking a flirtatious grin at the guy who’s holding his own cheeks, dismayed.

“We couldn’t believe you were just, like, changing your sound completely,” the taller guy says. “But Neil, man, I see why they’d take a chance for a voice like yours. It’s sick, dude.”

“Thanks,” Neil says stiffly.

“He’s not used to being recognized, yet,” Nicky says apologetically. “You’re taking his fan virginity.”

They titter, and the woman says, “we’re honoured.” She nudges her friend and widens her eyes meaningfully.

“We can’t really hang out though, sorry guys. Low profile tonight,” Nicky says. His smile is less believable by the second.

“Totally,” they chorus.

“I just quickly want to say, Andrew,” the first guy starts, breathless. “I know you get this all the time, but your lyrics saved my life. I couldn’t believe someone understood me like that, and—and you’re my--you inspire--I mean. I’m sorry, I’m so tongue-tied, I—“

“I didn’t write them for you,” Andrew says. 

The fan’s face crumples. Nicky looks at Neil, panicked, and then he forces a loud, incongruous laugh.

“Wow, good one,” Nicky says. “He doesn’t mean it, obviously.”

“Don’t I?” Andrew says.

“We appreciate it,” Neil interrupts. “But we can’t talk anymore.“

“Right, sorry, I’m so—“

They urge one another up the stairs, apologizing and thanking them, the one guy looking on the verge of tears through the bars of his friends’ arms, until they disappear up to the next level of seats.

“You could’ve pretended to be human,” Nicky hisses as soon as they’re gone.

“They call us monsters,” Andrew says. “What do they expect?” 

Nicky groans. “Please can we have fun, and not ruin anyone else’s night, especially our  _fans_? People are gonna egg our car.”

Neil’s stomach squirms, and he crosses his arms over it. There could be well-meaning, invasive people like that everywhere, and now he’s tipsy and angry and stuck.

The house lights go down a few minutes later, and the whole crowd sucks in a collective breath before they plunge headfirst into cheering.

Neil’s arms loosen. Nicky stands up at his side, hooting, and everyone follows suit, craning towards the stage, wanting to be the first thing the band sees.

Dan comes out first, waving with both hands, and Matt follows, winking at the crowd and sliding his guitar over his head. Allison and Renee emerge from either side of the stage, Allison towering in high heels and glowing under the lights. Renee’s hair is wild, and her face is different, tongue caught in her teeth, almost cocky.

They fit behind their instruments like joints cracking into place, and they play their first chord in perfect unison, all of them operating different parts of the same body.

The crowd roars their approval. Neil sits upright. He’s surprised to feel Andrew standing up beside him, stepping into the aisle to watch. He follows without thinking.

The jangling, bopping drum line doesn’t wait for the strings to catch up, and Renee doesn’t need to watch to see that they’re following her. Her wrists are supple, and she’s lost to the music like she’s been playing for hours and not seconds.

The room goes up in flames when Dan starts singing, like the fans are all hungry, dry wood, and she’s a spark. She works the microphone free from its stand and starts running with it.

“Fucking excellent, right,” Nicky shouts, and Neil nods, mesmerized. The crowd moves together even separated by sections and rows of seats. 

It’s nothing like an Ausreißer concert, where boiling blood turns into wine, and everyone turns their desperate faces up to the stage like they’re waiting to be healed. Foxes sing like they’re in love and they fought for it. 

Neil can admit that they’re as musically proficient as the monsters, too, making up for lack of technical flair with a complete understanding of their sound.

Matt smiles dopily down at his guitar and then at Dan, like he can’t decide which deserves his attention more. When she floats towards him, he gets springy with it, teasing her with guitar licks, carving shapes into her oaky voice. Allison’s hand goes protectively to her tuning pegs whenever she has a break in the music, but her bass is rich and in tune.

They do an old-fashioned crescendo like it’s a classical piece, and Dan is almost conducting, hitting the air when Renee smashes the cymbals, gesturing for more when Allison starts a slippery solo, so fast that she laughs and tosses her hair, exhilarated.

Neil makes a hurt noise that gets swallowed in the din, but Andrew looks at him anyway. Neil looks back, studying his wide black pupils and wondering why he only bothers to pay attention when he’s stoned.

He remembers the wide eyes of the kid with the armbands, the agony of his disappointment, and he forces himself to look back out at the band.

One song finishes and another climbs on its back. People move and mill out of their seats towards the stage. He feels like he’s seeing double, like he’s watching a long pilgrimage that’s somehow been condensed or played back.

The first break in the music, Dan laughs her way out of the song, takes a swig of wine, and says “how was  _that_?” into the mic, pointing out towards the place where the monsters are standing. Nicky puts two fingers to his mouth and whistles.

Her stage presence is unparalleled. She’s funny and a little hard on her audience, begging them to sing louder, drive her offstage if they can. Neil can see why she’s in charge, unofficially. She paces circles around the stage like she’s boosting morale. She barely needs the microphone to be heard.

They topple back into their set without warning, a trust fall of a count-in where Renee bangs out a few warning shots and everyone’s hands fly to their instruments.

Somewhere in the thicket of fans, Neil hears someone call, “Andrew!” He sees an incongruous flash, turned towards the audience and not the stage.

“Nicky, Nicky Hemmick! Nicky, over here—“

“Andrew,” Neil starts.

“We love you, Neil,” someone screams.

“Don’t—“

Neil’s jostled down a stair, and Andrew yanks him back up.

“Ignore them,” Andrew says viciously.

“Yeah,” Nicky agrees, but he’s clearly rattled. “What are they gonna do?”

Neil struggles to get his bearings. A few of them are still shouting, recording them with their phones or fighting their way through the crowd towards them. Nicky motions for them to stop, but a few people get close enough to beg for autographs or snap blurry photos of themselves with the band members in the background. He wonders if it was the fans from before, upset enough to tip off the whole crowd to their seat numbers. 

“Bet you didn’t think we were this famous, huh?” Nicky jokes nervously. 

Andrew has no problem with shoving people away, and Nicky frantically apologizes as many times as he can before he just starts shaking his head. Neil is forced painfully into Nicky’s side, and he can hear people in their row restlessly asking what’s going on.

Most of the audience is oblivious, still focused on Foxes’ raucous energy, but the three of them are surrounded for another ten minutes before people start to get frustrated enough to give up. The rest of them are shoulder-tapped by security, and the throng dwindles to nothing.

“You okay?” Nicky asks. Neil nods, but when he blinks he can still see pinholes of light from camera flashes. He knows that the photos will end up online where anyone can see him as he is right now, and they can guess at his habits or zero in on his location if they want to.

He’s been reckless for a long time, but standing pooled in stage lights feels entirely, chokingly different from wading down into the crowd and feeling the attention slither around him like seaweed.

Andrew crushes a hand to the back of his neck, and Neil inhales all at once.

“Kinda ironic that crowds freak you out so much when you sing for one every night,” Nicky says. He’s standing half in front of Neil, eclipsing the concert still unfolding in the background.

“It’s not the crowd.” Neil shakes his head to clear it. “It’s—they all know who I am.”

‘They  _think_  they do,” Nicky corrects firmly, fingers curling into Neil’s arms. The harpy tattoo peers out from under his sheer sleeve, a monster in a veil.

“They want to,” Andrew says, gaze tossed out to the back of the venue. His face is so blank and washed out under the lights that it’s like it’s been chemically stripped of colour. “You’ve caught their attention.”

Neil pulls free from Nicky’s arms and sits heavily in his seat. “I don’t want it.”

“You might not have a choice,” Nicky says, sitting next to him, smothering the distance Neil keeps trying and failing to cultivate.

“You always have a choice,” Andrew says, and when Neil looks up at him, he’s holding out his right hand with its painted  _yes_. Neil accepts it gingerly, and Andrew drags him to his feet.

They watch the rest of the concert from backstage.

Andrew sits propped up on an amp, and Nicky alternates between trying to get the band’s attention from the wings, and mimicking Matt’s solos with vigorous air guitar. Neil suspects he’s trying to get him to laugh.

Neil has enough distance now to feel stupid about locking up during such a minor incident and proving Kevin right. The crowd has already forgotten them, or never knew they were there. The show goes on. 

They’re coming up on their encore performance when Neil feels a buzzing at his hip. 

He fishes an unfamiliar cellphone out of his pocket and stares uncomprehendingly at the message lingering on screen, sent from a number he doesn’t recognize.

A neat little ’60’ and nothing else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow plot! secrets! confusion (mostly on the part of the author)!!
> 
> I hope you guys like some good old fashioned filling, stay tuned for revelations, tattoos, and hot goss


	6. Chapter 6

His shoes squelch through rotten leaves, and he grinds his toes in, trying to leave an impression in the frozen mud. He’s sitting close enough to the fire pit to get fried. The cold air is spritzed with the kind of intense heat that makes you feel feverish and radioactive.

The moon is a few turns past full, slouching in the air like a beach ball that’s been squashed on one side.

Andrew smokes. His eyes are closed against the glare, but his lawn chair absorbs all the smoke and heat and traps him in the moment. He presses his callused fingers together through the filter until they meet. The screen door wheezes open behind him, but he keeps his eyes shut.

Footsteps, and then Neil’s voice asks, “what are you doing out here?”

Andrew opens his eyes towards the sky. “Avoiding you,” he says. Neil rustles closer.

“You need a fire for that?”

“I thought if I stared into it for long enough it might burn your face from my memory,” he says honestly.

“I thought it was my personality that bothered you.”

“It’s everything.”

Neil huffs. Shifts. Andrew looks over at him. There’s a piece of hair on his forehead that’s working itself into a spiral. He has a windbreaker zipped up to his chin, but his ankles are bare and his shoes are untied. He imagines himself lurching over the fire and dragging Neil in with him.

“Doesn’t it hurt, to sit that close?” Neil asks. He unfolds the other lawn chair and drops it a foot away from Andrew’s.

“Yes,” Andrew says. A headache crawls into his brain and squeezes both lobes together. He feels like a water balloon that won’t break.

“Then why are you doing it?”

He swallows, and looks away from the deflated moon. “To feel.”

Neil pauses, and Andrew stares him down, feeling overwhelmed and irritable.

“Anything in particular? Maybe the same thing you’re looking for when you have pills and whiskey for breakfast?”

“That,” he says, flicking ash from his cigarette. “Is not feeling. You know that as well as I do.”

Neil shrugs. He looks on-edge, and his knee’s been bouncing since he sat down. “I don’t know if I understand choosing pain over nothing.”

“I get bored of choosing nothing.”

“Is that why you perform? To feel something?”

Andrew digests this question just enough for his body to reject it. “I think I’m done answering questions.” He starts to leave, wobbling dangerously near the metal cage the fire is bucking against.

“Wait,” Neil says quickly. “What about our trade?”

“What about it?”

“Tell me what you want.”

His mind races and grabs for things that he doesn’t even slow down to contemplate. His wishes and fears collide and stick together. Neil waits with his fists clenched on the arms of his chair and his lip caught between his teeth.

“Show me your scars,” his mouth says. Neil’s face changes. Clouds passing over the sun.

“Okay,” he says finally. “If you answer three of my questions, right now.”

Andrew’s gaze doesn’t waver, and Neil rewards him with the edge of a smile, just a glint of it, the there-and-gone flash of a concealed weapon.

“Why did you start drumming?” Neil asks. It’s not at all the question he expected, but it should have been. It’s absurd, the way Neil reveres music, the way it’s tipping out of him always, measured cups full at first, and then pitchers, buckets, storms.

“Juvie had an arts program for ‘character building’,” he replies. “I signed up so I could hit something without getting punished.”

Neil’s eyebrows raise. “Why were you in juvie?”

“Why do you think?”

“Murdering your mother?”

Andrew narrows his eyes. Neil is focused, frank, and knowing, maneuvering through a bluff with his cards to his chest.

He’d wanted the fire to lift a layer of skin, maybe singe him a little, make his hair stand up. Sitting with Neil is like skipping straight to a second degree burn. “Who have you been talking to?”

“Is it true?” Neil asks, deftly avoiding the question.

“I don’t have a mother,” he says. He can’t even contemplate the idea of attaching himself to Tilda like that, at letting her have any title other than the neat red ‘deceased’ on her body bag. He focuses hard so he doesn’t think of Cass.

“Aaron’s mom, then. Tilda,” Neil says, a little impatiently. Andrew’s ears ring with distant surprise at the extent of his knowledge. “You were in the car when she died.”

“Yes,” he says flatly.

“So why didn’t you?”

“Die? I’ve been asking myself that question for a decade.”

Neil sniffs, warming his hands on the fire, mouth flattened by contemplation. “Did she hit you? Is that why you did it? Is that why it bothered you so much that my mother—“

“You don’t understand anything about this,” Andrew interrupts, feeling aggression rev and spin out in his chest. There’s something about Neil that’s so even and cool that he swears he can see his reflection in him. “And your questions are up.” He throws his cigarette into the fire and watches it catch and spark. “I have to talk to Nicky about his loose mouth.”

“It wasn’t Nicky,” Neil admits, fiddling with his own hands, looking uncomfortable. “The foxes like to gossip. What I wanna know is how bad your childhood was to warrant that kind of response.”

“Tilda wasn’t a part of my childhood. Neither was Aaron.” He stands up.

Neil’s gaze snaps towards him, surprised. “What—“

“Show me.”

Neil’s expression ticks, just a little crack of discomfort in that mirror. “The fire—“

“Leave it.” He tamps down the impatient urge to pull Neil to his feet himself.

Andrew leads the way to the back door, feeling the cool air wash mercifully over the places where his control has worn away. For Andrew there’s almost no difference between numbness and composure. 

Neil follows a couple of steps behind, his gate uneven over the broken stones and tree roots littering their unkempt backyard.

Inside it’s cool and dark, unusually quiet except for the distant murmur of music playing in Kevin’s room, the rustle of their boots coming off, and Neil’s jacket unzipping. The space next to the door is narrow, and their elbows knock together.

Neil leads them back to his room at the end of the hall, and Andrew’s headache compounds. It’s exactly the same pressure that you get in your ears when you’re swimming to the bottom of a pool.

The door opens, then closes gently behind them. The room is chilly from the poorly sealed windows, and almost pitch dark until Neil clicks on the bedside lamp.

Andrew can smell him in the sheets, in the air. The room was meant for last minute guests, but Neil has brought such a particular permanence to it that Andrew knows it will belong to him even after he’s gone.

Neil pulls his shirt over his head and drops it at the foot of the bed. 

His arms spasm and drop like he was going to cover himself and thought better of it. He stands as if for inspection, the cold air raising gooseflesh all the way down his chest.

Andrew considers his own mistake. He’s magnetized. Electrified. Furious.  

The scars are too numerous to contemplate as anything but a collection. Many of them are old, shrunken in that way that scars get when you’ve grown out of them. Some are newer, pink and knobbly, at odd angles. The pattern is expansive as a tattoo, a shifting, breathing story.

Neil’s stomach sucks in, and his shoulders curl like dry leaves. Andrew touches his bullet wound with his thumb.

“Someone shot you,” he says quietly. The skin is warm and dusky beneath his fingers, still alive despite being so torn.

“More tried,” Neil replies. His voice is so close to Andrew’s ear that it doesn’t sound like Neil at all.

His hands move, nearly unprompted. “How much money did you owe to earn this—“ He puts his palm flat to what is unmistakably the brand of an iron, and Neil’s chest pitches sharply.

“I got that one at home,” he tells him. “You’re not the only people who think I have a smart mouth.”

“It must be true then.” He slots his fingers over his ribs, where a panel of skin is white and shapeless. “These are killing wounds. They cannot be from a mother who wanted you alive.” He thumbs the place where it looks like something was hooked in his belly button and torn through. “Not from a life on the run either.”

“They’re not,“ he says softly. Andrew’s hands lift, just fingertips shy of not touching at all.

“Are you going to tell me who you are, really? Your lies have stopped convincing me.” 

Neil might have been an excellent liar if he hadn’t wanted Ausreißer so badly, so transparently.

Neil squirms. He puts a hand to his head as if to steady himself. “Abram.” Andrew turns the word over in his head, looking for a way in. “That’s a name I can give you that doesn’t cost me anything.”

“Your real name,” Andrew guesses.

Neil tilts his head. “It’s the only thing my mother gave me that I still have.”

“Then I do not want it.” Andrew levers himself backwards, and the space between them is freezing cold.

“Fine.” Neil turns away, and Andrew stares at the surgical style slice down his back. He’s starting to feel sore with tension, exhausted with holding himself back when it’s usually the easiest thing he can do. Neil rustles around in the top drawer of his dresser and produces a slip of paper. He eyes Andrew for a beat, then hands it over. “Do you recognize this number?”

He looks at the rigid tops of the fives and the messy overhanging loop on the nine. He recognizes Neil’s handwriting from the lyrics he had stolen and wrung out and set to dry, but the number itself is unfamiliar.

“No,” he says, watching Neil’s disappointment occur to him. “Where did it come from?”

“Someone’s been—texting me.”

Andrew reads the worry in his voice with interest. “You don’t have a phone.”

“Right,” Neil says, too quickly. “Forget it.” He picks up his shirt and turns it over in his hands. “It’s probably a fan.” The lamplight puts shadows in every dip of him. He’s fit, and slender, and his scars fit him like pins and seams on a half-tailored suit.

He carried fire smoke inside with him on his hair, so much that they might as well be in a house on fire. Andrew watches Neil pull the shirt over his head and sit delicately on the bed, and he makes himself walk away.

______

Palmetto’s front windows are dark when he pulls up, but he knows Wymack will be somewhere inside with his headphones on, and that he’ll pretend to be angry when Andrew comes in after hours. He’ll get angry for real when he swipes his whiskey, and he likes it that way. The predictable scowl, the lack of follow through; he knows what it looks like and how it will feel when it hits.

Neil is different, so unpredictable that it’s off-putting, enough to drive Andrew out of his own house. This time, the moon had bobbed along outside his car window and reminded him of Neil’s half-crushed expression when he’d left him.

He parks along the side wall of the studio and sits in the dark, thinking of Tilda and then of Abram. He doesn’t trust Neil’s flighty impulses or vague stories, but he trusts his scars, his curiosity, and that name. Abram.

The entryway is dim when he gets inside, but he can hear lights buzzing down the hall. He wanders through corridors at a clip, until conversation starts to waft from Wymack’s office and he pulls up short. He lightens his step, and eases close enough to match the voices to Wymack, Dan, and Matt.

“… just a feature. We’re not poaching him or anything,” Dan’s saying.

“Do you really think Andrew will see it that way?” Wymack replies.

“Do you really think I care what the monster thinks?”

“Maybe you should.”

“Bottom line, it’s no one’s choice but Neil’s,” Matt says. Andrew leans into the stretch of wall outside the door and listens hard.

“No, of course,” Dan says. “I just don’t think he should limit himself to their, you know—sound. He stumbled into the music scene, he’s a total newbie in this industry, and I don’t know if they can even handle one other.”

“If anyone can handle that team, it’s Neil,” Wymack says. “Kid’s quick to learn, and stubborn about it.”

“So is Kevin.”

“You’re telling me.” There’s a pause and a creak as someone shifts in their chair. “But Kevin needs to be reminded of their potential. Neil’s good at provoking them, for better or worse.”

“Do you know I mentioned the twins’ case, and he hadn’t even heard about it? It’s like he hasn’t seen any news from the last decade.”

“I told her not to tell Neil all of their business,” Matt says, sounding exasperated.

“It’s public knowledge!”

“Not by choice, Dan, you know that.”

She makes a frustrated noise. “I’m just worried it’s going to end in flames, and I don’t think any of them can afford to take more damage.”

“His name is written on our contract,” Andrew says from the doorway. They all wheel around to look at him, wide-eyed. Wymack curses and puts his face in his hand. “He lives and works with us,” Andrew continues. “He’s our business.”

Dan recovers first. “We’re allowed to be friends with him.”

“If you think giving away our secrets endeared you to him, you’re wrong.”

Dan looks sideways at Matt and back again. “What—“

“He doesn’t trust gossip. And I don’t trust you.” He trails one hand along his wrist, where a trio of concealed knives weigh against his skin. “The next time you drag Aaron into your musical politics, you lose a finger, understand?”

Matt stands up, and his chair spins nervously in his wake. “Don’t talk to her like that.”

“Don’t talk to us at all.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Dan says. Andrew steps menacingly forward, and Wymack throws out a hand.

“Alright, alright. It’s too damn late for this.” He rubs his temples. “Andrew, get the whiskey from the cabinet, I know you know how to jimmy the lock. Matt, sit down. Someone explain this to me.”

Andrew obeys mechanically, pacing to the adjoining room to crack the cabinet hidden shoddily behind a coat rack. He hears Matt sigh behind him, Dan moving and whispering nearby. He wiggles the lock, staring at his own hand against the dark wood, vision doubling, remembering tracing the pathways of Neil’s scars. His grip tightens, and the metal cracks.

“Today, Minyard,” Wymack calls. Andrew pulls with brute force and the wood gives way, splintering. “What the fuck was that?” he hears. He ignores him, knocks the door aside, and grabs the liquor from the top shelf.

He’s halfway through a gulp when he reenters the room, and he catches himself on the doorframe.

Wymack sighs. “Christ’s sake. Come sit down.” Andrew drops the bottle on the desk, then sits on the window ledge so that Wymack has to roll back into the corner to see all of them at once. “You all love to make shit difficult, don’t you?”

“Don’t lump us in with him,” Matt complains.

“Oh, so you’re telling me you haven’t been interfering with Andrew’s lot? He’s acting like this for his health?”

Dan slouches back into her chair. “He’s acting like this because he’s a sociopath.”

Wymack reaches for his whiskey.

“Look,” Matt starts. “Neil had some questions about where Ausreißer came from, Palmetto’s history, that kind of stuff.”

“And?” Wymack prompts.

“And we told him,” Dan says. “About the twins’ mom—“

“Try again,” Andrew interrupts. Dan barely looks at him.

“—and about Kevin and Riko, Evermore’s break-up, the… accident.”

“Accident,” Andrew echoes.

“Kevin’s hand,” Matt clarifies slowly. “We didn’t tell him…”

“We wouldn’t tell him,” Dan says softly. “No matter what we think of you, we’d never—you know we’d never do that.”

Andrew leaves the room.

“Andrew,” Wymack says, but he’s moving fast, focusing on the sweaty, velvety feel of his armbands, the kick-drum pulse that never stops, struggling to feel something, struggling to stop feeling—

He clips the side of a couch with his hip and nearly trips.

“Andrew,” Wymack says again, ten paces behind him, looking thunderous. “They’re not going around telling people, okay? Wanna explain to me why this is fazing you?”

“Something had to, eventually,” he tells him, a lightning strike of vulnerability. Wymack looks critically at him.

“And it’s Neil, huh?” He says it like its nothing, like he’s not a police flashlight finding Andrew’s crime scene. He lets himself close his eyes. When he opens them, Wymack is wound tight with frustration. “Just don’t let this get in the way of the music. You know how many bands break up when two members split?”

“Lucky for you,” Andrew says, “that won’t be a problem.”

“Okay,” Wymack says slowly. “So are we insecure or are we stupid?”

“I can’t speak for you,” he replies, and he turns to leave.

“Stupid, then,” Wymack says. Andrew keeps walking towards the exit. “Hey,” he calls. “That kid puts more stock in what you say than all of Foxes combined. I wouldn’t worry.”

“I don’t care what he thinks. They can tell him whatever they want, if he asks.” Andrew hefts the door open, and hesitates, face turned against the night air. “But they’re betting on the wrong people.”

Wymack’s expression sinks towards pity, and Andrew lets the door thud closed behind him.

______

When he gets back to the house it’s pushing two in the morning. He leaves his shoes on, bypassing Nicky in the living room where he’s passed out in front of muted TV, and bursts into Neil’s room.

It had occurred to him halfway home that Neil was trying to put the story back into Andrew’s hands when he’d questioned him by the fire. He  _puts more stock in what you say than all of Foxes combined_.

In the panel of light from the hall, he watches Neil snap awake and dive immediately for something under his pillow. When his eyes adjust and find Andrew, his body goes limp with relief.

Andrew’s adrenaline freezes mid-leap—somewhere between the ledges of one rooftop and another—and plummets into the chasm between.

“What is it?” Neil asks hoarsely.

Andrew keeps his face very still, pretending that he didn’t storm in with some half-baked notion of clarifying the Foxes’ partial truths, as if the full flush of reality would mean something to Neil.

“I didn’t meet Aaron until I was sixteen. I was left in the foster system. He was kept.” He breathes in, holds it, then says, “your mother kidnapped you.”

Neil hesitates, hands clenched in the bedding, looking miserable. He jerks his head.

“So did Aaron’s. She tried to kill him every day and called it motherhood. So I got rid of her.”

Neil nods again.

“Any more questions?”

“Not today,” Neil replies tiredly. “You?”

He thinks for a moment, until the obvious question emerges like something deadly cresting the surface of the sea; the catastrophe of a fin next to your lifeboat, the vagueness of its body, hidden below. 

“How did your mother die?”

Neil swallows. His hair is flattened from sleep, and he looks like a lost child.

“She didn’t run fast enough. Got herself shot, and bled out on the side of the road. So I got rid of her,” he echoes, and Andrew steps forward. Neil looks up. His eyes are so pale in the spare light, they could belong to a corpse.

He should have recognized death on him earlier. If grief is the rope around your throat, talking about it is synching the noose, and Neil’s been kicking and gasping since they found him.

“Another walking tragedy for Wymack’s collection.”

“Running tragedy,” Neil reminds him. He pulls his knees up, watching Andrew for his next move.

“Not moving very fast for a runner.”

Neil looks away. “I’m getting comfortable.”

“You shouldn’t be.”

“No,” Neil agrees hollowly. His face spasms like he might laugh, and then he says, “it won’t last.”

Andrew’s eyes rove over his wilted shoulders. “Are you planning on going somewhere?”

Neil doesn’t look at him, but his jaw twitches, and his knuckles are white.

______

Kevin twirls his finger in the air, signalling for the band to get their instruments ready. He slides the controls on the soundboard around with his other hand, and the air hums with machinery. Andrew’s ears ring from playing for so long in such a tight space.

“From the top, with crisper harmonies this time,” he says, making his way back to his spot. “Andrew, take that thing out of your mouth.”

Andrew clenches his teeth around the coffee stirrer and swivels it to the opposite side of his mouth. “No thanks.”

Kevin narrows his eyes and shrugs his bass on, twanging a couple of notes to check that the tuning is still tight. “You’re not mumbling through your part because you’re in a pissy mood.”

“What mood,” Aaron says. “That’s his personality.”

“Maybe we could take a break,” Nicky suggests, slouching against the side of the piano, guitar nudged up at an odd angle. “This is getting messy.”

“I know what your ‘breaks’ look like,” Kevin says. “And nothing’s going to get cleaner with grease and nicotine in you.”

“What about pot and gatorade?” Nicky asks innocently.

“Wymack,” Kevin says imploringly

Wymack’s sequestered in the sound booth, and he looks irritably up from the monitor. “Just get it done,” he says. “Nicky and Aaron need to tune again, you’re flat. So are you, for that matter, Neil.”

Neil wrings the microphone’s neck. “Give me a C?” Nicky stretches over the keyboard and plunks a finger on middle C. Neil hums the note. Clears his throat. “Okay. Let’s do it again.”

Andrew hits the snare three times, a wake up call, and then he takes off like a runaway train. His hands ache badly. Their recording sessions have started to turn into recording weeks. 

Sometimes they take turns in the studio, sometimes they sit around a table, warping and layering their sound, picking samples to waterfall through their tracks. Sometimes Andrew writes verses, crumples them into balls, and throws them at the side of Neil’s head.

Sometimes, like right now, they pile into the studio together and shred through their songs, improvising, all of them gripping the music so tightly that it starts to lose its shape and pull in the middle.

Neil sings, flat again, and he hears it himself because he drops the melody an octave, lower than Andrew thought he could sing.

His drumsticks pretzel, but the shape they make is better, almost, the offbeat is interesting against Neil’s low-slung vocals. Andrew starts to talk-sing the melody, the way they used to do all of their songs, on pitch but unadorned. Neil’s mouth quirks, and he picks up the harmony instead.

Kevin signals a time out, but Wymack shakes his head and holds a hand up.

The coffee stirrer droops out of Andrew’s mouth. Neil and Andrew carry the music between them like they’re moving furniture where they want it.

As a rule, he doesn’t feel this way when he’s sober. He’s wedged between sleepless nights and obnoxious personalities, and—in some abstract, uncomfortable way, like growing pains—he’s enjoying himself.

Neil has that accidental, out of place smile on his face. His fingers glide down the mic stand slowly, and a shiver cracks down on Andrew’s shoulders.

His eyes bounce from Neil to Kevin, who’s looking at them with wide eyes, as if he’s waiting for their unexpected chemistry to fizzle. Andrew stops singing out of spite, but Neil picks up the slack, finding the melody again.

They all sprint to the end of the song, barely staying upright, bursting apart as soon as the last note sounds.

There’s barely a moment of panting quiet before applause bursts out of the booth. Dan and Renee are there with Wymack when Andrew looks, beaming and clapping. Nicky crows, waving them inside. Andrew chucks a drumstick at the window, and Dan gives him the finger, right up against the glass.

“That was really good, guys,” Renee tells them as soon as the door between them is open.

“I’m impressed,” Dan agrees.

“I’m so glad that’s the take you heard,” Nicky says breathlessly.

“What are you doing here?” Kevin asks, pointing a water bottle towards them in an accusatory manner.

“We were in the neighbourhood,” Renee says, showing her teeth. Andrew catches her eye and lifts his chin. “We’re curious about what you’re working on.”

“She means I wanted to crash,” Dan admits, shameless. Her fingernail skates over one of his cymbals and makes a thin, metallic sound. Andrew holds his remaining drumstick threateningly over her hand until she moves it. “Neil, can we talk to you?”

“You can’t have him,” Nicky says.

“Can we rent him?” Dan retorts cheekily.

“Ask him,” Andrew says, “what he wants.”

Renee stops in front of Neil, smiling, but Neil steps backwards. Andrew’s blood spikes with annoyance. He’s so obvious with his dislike but cagey about his reasoning. 

“What do you think of featuring on one of our tracks?”

Neil’s expression twists, and he looks over at Andrew for help. He stares blankly back until Neil falters and has to find his own reply.

“Why me?” is the first thing out of his mouth, which is absurd enough to make monsters and foxes exchange conspiratorial glances.

Dan huffs. “It’s like he doesn’t know that half the country’s talking about him.”

Neil takes this poorly. He sits heavily on the piano bench, looking so conflicted and pathetic that Dan has to crouch in front of him just to try and get his attention back.

“Hey,” she says. “No pressure.”

Neil doesn’t move.

“Seriously,” she insists. Her eyes twitch up to meet Andrew’s. “Your choice.”

“We’re experimenting with rock,” Renee tells him, low, like she’s confiding in him. “We might need you to bridge the gap for us, a little.”

The lure of experimental music is obviously too much for him. “Fine,” Neil says. “But Ausreißer comes first.”

Dan grins. “Of course.” She claps a genial hand on Neil’s thigh. “We’re not gonna take away the only stability this freak show has ever seen, Neil, come on.”

“Maybe you don’t give them enough credit,” he says, curiously soft. “They could bounce back.”

“Good thing they don’t have to, since we’re  _not stealing you_ ,” Dan says, glaring at Nicky.

“Too bad,” Aaron says.

“Let’s just try it out,” Dan says. “Don’t overthink it.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed,” Kevin interjects, “we’re working.”

“Wymack tells us you’ve been working since noon.”

“So?”

“So it’s time for play.” She slides onto the bench next to Neil and plays a fragment of a generous, right-handed tune. “A little after hours collab. Come on. Why not?”

“Some of us have deadlines,” Kevin says.

“What good is having so much talent in one building if we don’t learn from each other?” Renee asks.

“It could be a good exercise,” Neil says, voice curling with interest. “They’re fresher than us right now, and their sound is completely different. We’re more creative when we’re challenged.”

Kevin rolls his neck and exhales. “How would this even work?”

Dan and Renee high five. Andrew picks at the flaky leather on his seat irritably.

“Give me one minute,” Renee says, nipping out of the studio. The band reels a little, shifting from foot to foot and adjusting to the new dynamic in the room. Dan lifts Neil’s hands playfully onto the keys next to hers. When Renee returns, she has her electric violin tucked under her arm. Neil sits up straight, Nicky cheers.

“This is gonna be so weird,” he says.

“Haven’t you played together before?” Neil asks.

“Nah,” Nicky replies. “You’re bringin’ people together, babe.”

Renee bounces her bow on the strings, making a wonky sort of cross where they intersect. She pulls a cord around from the nearest amp, shaking it out and plugging it in. She peels a mean sound from her instrument, then plucks a fiddly pizzicato on her way up to the tuning pegs.

“Can you follow me, Andrew?” she asks. His wrist twitches involuntarily, and he nods. He knows the way Renee plays as well as he knows how she brawls. He would come in on time wearing earplugs in the dark. “Let’s try to stay in the vicinity of B flat major,” she suggests.

The violin nosedives into a fast solo, skidding sideways into double stops and raunchy vibrato. Her jaw works against the chin rest. Andrew finds a counterpoint to her sound, a touchy rhythm that ricochets around the drum kit whenever she gives him room to breathe.

Renee tears her solo into halves over and over again until there’s nothing, and then Kevin can’t resist taking over for her.

Neil has this flushed, exhilarated look on his face. Dan whispers in his ear, clattering notes together like pots and pans. Neil watches their hands closely and plays complementary chords in the bass, anchoring everyone.

Nicky and Aaron aren’t as proficient at making music from scratch, but they can find their way through the chord progressions. Root, major third, perfect fifth, minor seventh, repeat. Everyone lags a little when Kevin tries to drag them to a new key.

Dan plays a few out of place accidentals, laughing at herself, and Renee comes back in with a little jokey riff from a Queen song. The music peters out, but the amps are still buzzing, alive.

“Turns out rock can be fun,” Dan says breathlessly. “Who knew?”

“More fun if you know what you’re doing,” Kevin says, but his hands are shaking like they do when they’ve played a good set.

“Not necessarily,” Renee says easily.

“Kevin,” Wymack says. 

He’s standing in the doorway, hands braced on either side of it. His expression is stricken.

He doesn’t have time to say anything else before two figures appear at Wymack’s back, dressed head to toe in black. Kevin’s face drains of all colour.

Riko Moriyama, and tucked into his side like a comma, Jean Moreau.

“Go,” Wymack barks in Kevin’s direction, “you don’t have to be here.”

Andrew stands immediately, and Renee drops her violin in her haste to get between him and Riko. She tussles with him, but he’s spurred on by rage, charred with it. Dan struggles to wrench his arms behind his back.

“Kevin,” Riko says. “It’s been so long.”

“You can’t be here,” Nicky says.

Riko’s eyes flicker with annoyance. “We need to speak with you.”

“No seriously, you can’t fuckingbe here.”

“What’s going on,” Neil says in German. He’s standing, both hands on the lid of the piano, looking ready to throw a punch.

“Kevin’s worst nightmare,” Nicky replies.

“You have no right to—“ Dan starts, voice tight with the strain of holding Andrew back.

“Kevin is family,” Riko interrupts coolly. “I have every right.” Andrew plants his feet and pulls one arm free.

“Riko,” Neil guesses. Andrew can see the light of whatever the Foxes told him about the Moriyamas dawning on his face. “I don’t really believe in family. But from what I’ve gathered, it’s not so much formed on a basis of total abandonment in someone’s time of need.”

Riko’s expression turns glacial. “Who is this?” he asks. It’s obvious that he’s feigning ignorance, trying to get a rise out of Neil.

“Kevin’s new lead singer,” Neil answers easily. “Oh, is that a problem for you? I know you like to call what you do singing.”

Dan scoffs. Andrew falters just long enough for Renee to wrangle his arm and leg back under her control.

“You don’t interest me,” Riko says. “I’m here with an offer for Kevin, and I’m not concerned with what he uses to pass the time.”

“You might be concerned to know that he’s never in a million years going with you,” Wymack says. Kevin looks between them stiffly, hands closed around the neck of his bass tightly enough for the strings to stripe his skin. “You can muscle your way in here, but your threats don’t work on us, and neither does your bribery. He’s not going anywhere.”

“Kevin, honestly,” Riko says. “This is a waste of your talents.”

“From what I’ve heard, you made  _sure_  his talents would be wasted, right?” Neil says. “But you forgot that you needed some kind of talent of your own. Can’t go solo if you can’t carry a tune.”

“We’re at the top of the charts every other week,” Riko says, venomous. “Our reputation speaks for itself. It is impossible to avoid the strength of our fanbase. You play bars and live out of a van.”

“We produce everything ourselves,” Neil says. “We fight for our acclaim with a quarter of your resources, and we sell out shows anyway. You’re the weaker half of a duo, and every penny of your family money couldn’t make your music good again.”

Jean frowns nervously. Nicky hoots, and Aaron cracks a smile that’s at odds with his crossed arms.

“Your bandmates have been feeding you misinformation. Your label is a laughing stock. You cannot begin to understand the Raven legacy, let alone dream of matching it yourselves.” He straightens his cuffs. “But I’m not here to put your amateur minds at rest. I am here because my uncle wishes to offer Kevin a position as a producer. I trust I do not need to tell you how much of an upgrade that is.”

Kevin shakes his head, looking sick.

Riko eyes Andrew where he is fixed and aimed towards him, a guillotine blade held back only by a length of rope.

“Come home,” he reiterates. “Your recovery was questionable enough, and now your repetitive strain may end your career permanently.”

“And whose fault is that, again?” Dan says viciously. Andrew catches Jean flinching.

“He heard you out,” Wymack says. “Hell, we all had the pleasure of listening to your narcissistic, fear-mongering bullshit, and it looks like none of us were impressed. Now get out of our studio.”

“We’ll be back,” Riko promises. “When you don’t have hands over your eyes and ears to avoid the truth.” He steps backwards, and Jean falls in line. “And your dogs are more effectively leashed.”

He takes another step, and Andrew spots the cruel line of a self-satisfied smile as he turns and walks back out into the hall.

There’s a shellshocked silence, and then Aaron says, ”what the fuck. They can just barge in at any time?”

“Kind of makes a guy feel unsafe,” Nicky says nervously. He crouches down to root through his bag, and Andrew knows he’s looking for their emergency liquor supply.

“The Moriyamas are better string-pullers than us, but they’re not better fighters,” Wymack says placatingly. “We’re not easily ambushed.”

Nicky stands up with cheap vodka in his hand, and Kevin latches onto it immediately.

“Well they sure as fuck managed it today,“ Dan says, finally gentling her grip. Andrew shrugs her off as soon as her guard is down, making a beeline in the direction that Riko left.

“Andrew, wait,” Neil calls, and Andrew stops just shy of the door. “He’s hoping someone will follow him.”

“Don’t give him the satisfaction,” Wymack says, putting a hand out and wincing when Andrew rips back out of his reach. “This isn’t the right time.”

“What better time than the middle of the night, on our turf, hm?” Andrew asks. He desperately resents his own helplessness. He hates being made into a liar. He thinks of the way Riko taunted Kevin, the way his eyes skated over Neil, Aaron, Nicky, like he was watching fish dart under the surface, holding a harpoon.

“There are eight of us,” Neil says. “Those are pretty good odds.”

“Do you think they came alone? Come on. There are two SUVs parked out front,” Wymack says.

“And I don’t think our eight is the same as the yakuza’s eight,” Renee says quietly.

“I’m not fighting them,” Kevin says, hushed.

“Not standing up for yourself, either, I guess,” Neil retorts. He looks fired up, shaking with that nervous energy that Riko always leaves behind.

“I knew he would come eventually, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to say no when he did,” he replies woodenly.

He sees Neil looking at Kevin carefully, the place where his hand is wet from gulping alcohol too quickly and spilling over his fist. The paralysis that shadowed him all the way through the encounter with Riko is morphing back into his usual coping mechanisms, the fear and spite that show up on him like welts.

“We don’t let him get that close again,” Andrew says. “Or I deal with him however I want.”

Wymack pinches the bridge of his nose. “I can’t guarantee—“

“I can,” Andrew says simply. “I won’t be held back twice.”

Tension stretches between them, until Wymack rolls his eyes and gives him half a nod. “We’ll see, gremlin. I know you have promises to keep, but so do I.”

Andrew swallows this. Behind him, Kevin sinks into the nearest chair, puts the open vodka between his feet, and hangs his head.

“So, uh, Neil,” Dan starts. “You’re not as quiet as I thought.”

“Do you think he could survive here if he was?” Renee asks seriously.

“Good point.”

“People like Riko don’t know what to do when they don’t have all the power in the room,” Neil says. Andrew’s fists curl at his sides.

“Good thing you’re such a fan of out-performing people,” Nicky jokes.

“Yeah, okay, okay, thanks Neil for being a smartass. Thanks everyone else for not killing anyone. Now get out of my sight. I’m locking up whether you’re in or out,” Wymack says.

He steps back into the booth to get his bearings, and the rest of them start to dutifully pack their things away. Dan escapes first, talking urgently on the phone to Matt, squeezing Neil’s shoulder on her way by. Renee follows a step behind her, looking meaningfully at Andrew as she goes.

While the rest of them unfasten cases and shrug on jackets, Neil wanders over with both hands shoved in his pockets. “We’re not the only ones with a deal, are we?” he asks quietly.

“What, do you feel less special?” Andrew says viciously. He feels for his cigarettes, muscle memory.

“I mostly feel uninformed,” Neil corrects.

“Ironic, considering your track record with lying to us.”

Their eyes strike against each other. His arms ache with the trauma of being restrained so violently. Neil had stepped in and held up Andrew’s bargain for him without even knowing it. He’d only just heard about Kevin and Riko, hadn’t lived it like everyone else at Palmetto, but he still managed to turn a secondhand story into artillery. Riko had left unharmed but not unfazed.

“I’ve already told you—“ he cuts himself off. “I know Kevin trusts you. But it’s not that easy for me.”

“It’s never easy. Don’t insult us.” Andrew puts a cigarette in his mouth and walks out of the room with half a mind to track Riko down or else take a knife to someone’s tires.

“Hey,” Neil says, jogging after him. “All of these debts, all of these promises to keep everyone safe. Is anyone watching your back?”

Andrew’s breath cracks in half. He turns and shoves him back into the nearest wall, and Neil clips his forearm on the corner of a door. Andrew watches his sleeve rip with faraway self-loathing.

“No one’s looking for me,” he says, and he turns back again, towards the exit, towards the clarity of the wet March air. The other monsters are starting to pile into the hall, and Neil’s arm is starting to bruise red.

“I find that hard to believe,” Neil calls as he rounds the corner. “You’re impossible to ignore.”

Ironic, Andrew thinks, for the second time in as many minutes, considering the way that Neil can pull the focus of someone like Riko, walk Ausreißer down into a foxhole, or lie so beautifully that you’re convinced that believing him won’t hurt at all.

Outside, Andrew lights the cigarette, takes a drag, and lets it burn in his hand. He thinks of Kevin’s bloodless lips trying to form a ‘no’. He thinks of Neil gravitating closer when Andrew smokes.

He thinks of bad habits, and he crushes the cigarette, half-smoked, under his heel.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in the immortal words of scooby doo: ruh roh
> 
> anyway everyone commenting on this fic?? wish I could give you the blood from my veins directly..... wish I could etransfer my love and affection..........


	7. Chapter 7

Neil wakes up, as usual, to the pinging of a text message. He doesn’t bother to look at it. He knows what it will say; the unassuming number, the conspicuous silence whenever he writes back. 

He rolls over so that the thinning comforter pulls and sticks beneath him, and he slits his eyes against the pre-dawn light.

Yesterday he’d deleted the number ’36’ from his messages and jammed his bare feet into his boots. He’d walked all the way out back to the dumpster with the cellphone cracking in his fist before his fear won out, and he’d pocketed it again.

He knows what day the zero should fall on. He’s learned to dread countdowns because he’s lived to see what comes on the other side of them, surfed the sand in an hourglass as it ebbed out from underneath him.

The monsters keep him busy, and so do the Foxes, now. They pull him in different directions, divide his attention, pique his curiosity. He’s acutely aware of how devastating it will be for him when he has to leave them, what a terrible thing he’s done by letting them close enough that they’ll notice when he’s dead. 

But no one endures like the lonely people who end up at Palmetto, and he knows no one will stumble for long.

He reaches into the swath of blankets and holds the phone in his hand. It buzzes again, the nudge of the same message insisting upon being read. He feels frustration crest and fall in his chest, and then he wonders if anyone else is awake. Sometimes Andrew will get up early and make eggos, or Kevin will go for a run before the sun is up, but they’ve been inconsistent while they sloshed through the songwriting process.

He’s heard Aaron making endless pots of coffee and Nicky in the basement, practicing licks without an amp in the middle of the night. Once, Neil wandered down and knelt the wrong way on the couch to watch him play. He wasn’t quite awake, and the music twanged against Nicky’s goofy grin and made Neil smile back at him.

Now that Ausreißer’s album is edited into submission, sent off for packaging, all of their tireless work crystallizing somewhere, he’s promised Foxes that he’ll record a vocal for them. It’s strange to think of them wanting his serious voice worked through their bright sound, incongruous as salt in coffee. It’s even stranger to think of the way his voice will be broadcast after he’s dead, perpetually echoing after his disappearance.

Their album is set to be released in a week, and then the next leg of their tour will roll up to meet them, and sometime in those delicate, dwindling months, Neil will be found. He fantasizes about leaving a ripple when he’s taken, and then he thinks better of it. When his mother died, he watched the fire take her skin, and her hair, and her eyes, and he thought, death would be easier if we didn’t let ourselves matter to one another.

He lets the phone sink back into the sheets, and sits up, swinging his legs over the side of the mattress. Someone knocks twice on the door, just the edge of a knuckle. Andrew.

“It’s open,” he says. 

Ever since Andrew had burst in, answering questions that Neil hadn’t even thought to ask, he’s taken to leaving his door unlocked.

Andrew opens the door and promptly crosses the room towards Neil’s dresser, not even sparing him a glance. His hair is unkempt, a riot of blond that won’t part correctly, fluffed up from sleeping on it wet.

Unlike the rest of the monsters, who’ve buckled back down into their routines, Andrew’s been acting increasingly erratic. He’s been self-medicating more often, and holding himself back from something so effectively that Neil can’t quite see what it is. Sometimes he seems to glitch out, cutting himself off mid-sentence, cagey and self-contained.

The drugs should make his tongue looser, but mostly it seems to make him say more of everything. It’s harder to find whole kernels of truth in a bowl full of bravado that’s puffed out like popcorn.

Andrew puts both hands on the knobs of Neil’s drawer and waits there. Neil nods, amused. He’s long since found a lock for the bottom drawer and secreted away his money and information. Andrew pulls the top drawer out, sawing it back and forth when the dufflebag catches. He digs briefly through Neil’s small selection of shirts, and picks out something in faded green. He throws it and some light-wash jeans in Neil’s direction.

“Up, get up. Renee’s already at the studio.”

“You have today off,” Neil says.

“Well deduced,” Andrew says. “I’m driving you.”

Neil hesitates. “I’m fine with walking.”

“Do what you want,” Andrew says flippantly. “I have an errand to run near the studio, and you can come with me or you can waste Renee’s time and mine.”

“ _That’s_  not manipulative,” Neil says sarcastically.

“I’m giving you a choice,” Andrew says. His gaze finds the burner phone nestled in Neil’s bedding, then trails up to catch his eye.

“Yes, okay. Just let me change.” He’s secretly glad to be ferried to the studio, to have earned Andrew’s passenger seat, and to not have to think about who could be tracking him on foot. Andrew crosses wordlessly to the threshold of his bedroom and closes the door behind him. He can hear him shifting his weight outside, guarding Neil’s privacy.

He dresses quickly and quietly in the clothes that Andrew picked out for him, feeling strangely flushed about the whole thing. He doesn’t want Andrew to know that he’s doing exactly what he suggested, or that it’s become a habit for him to do so.

They leave not ten minutes later, after he’s stopped in to use the bathroom and splash water on his face, teasing fingers through his hair and swigging Nicky’s mouthwash.

Andrew waits at the door, turning keys over in his hand, hair still wild, belt buckled kind of askew with the tail of it sticking out.

“Are you ready?” Neil asks tentatively. Andrew cranks open the screen door in response, and steps out into the sweet spring morning. Neil follows, watching his even gait, the full, yolky yellow of his hair.

They climb up into the cold barrel of the van. When Neil reaches for the dial to turn up the heat, Andrew catches his wrist.

“I can’t get any warmer.”

It’s around this point that Neil suspects that Andrew might already be high.

Maybe balancing the creative chaos of their album with the newness of Neil has taken more of a toll on Andrew than it has on the others. Something about working constantly, writing feelings into rhymes that you can chew and rinse and spit with has made him itchy and distracted.

“Did you take something?” Neil asks.

“Not yet,” Andrew says, reversing violently onto the street, much too broad a maneuver for such a large vehicle. He clips the opposite curb before he cracks into drive and takes off.

Neil watches his inscrutable face, the tightness around his mouth and the brightness of his eyes. He can’t tell.

“No one drives like this when they’re sober.”

“You know I do,” Andrew tells him. Neil does. He’s seen Andrew stoned, laughing like he doesn’t want to be doing it, the way people do when they’re being tickled. He’s also seen him drunk, soaked through with sweat, sticking to the seats, and he’s seen him storm-cloud sober. He always manages to make it feel like the van is on ice skates.

“Did Wymack ask you to hold my hand?”

Andrew considers this for a moment too long. “Depends on what you mean by that.”

“Babysit me,” Neil clarifies. “Drop me off and pick me up so I don’t cause another incident.”

“No,” Andrew says simply, turning left so sloppily that he almost clips a crossing pedestrian.

“Then why would you—why are you doing this?”

“Million dollar question.”

“Is there a million dollar answer?” Neil asks.

“There are no million dollar answers,” Andrew says. “There are disappointments.”

“So no one asked you to do this for me.”

Andrew looks at him. “You may have noticed that I do not do what people ask me to unless it’s in my best interest.”

“You’re not as selfish as you want people to think,” Neil says, looking away, out the window. The studio is creeping up on them, three intersections way, then two. He’s come to know the route well, imagining the bends in the road when he’s trying to fall asleep. “Defending Kevin could bring the yakuza down on you, and you’ve always known it. Just like you had no guarantee that killing Tilda for Aaron wouldn’t kill you too.”

“Most people wouldn’t give murder as an example of selflessness,” Andrew says. “Does it make you feel better, to make us into good people?”

“No, actually,” Neil says honestly. “It makes it harder to pretend I’m one of you.”

Andrew pulls up into the shaded side of the studio, and Neil breathes out heavily. The honesty comes so much easier now; after those first botched pricks to his veins the blood has just flowed and flowed.

“Here,” Andrew says, pulling his keys from the ignition and prying the ring open. He slips a little bronze key from the loop and hands it to Neil. “To our front door. Allison’s going to drive you home, and none of us are going to be there to let you in.”

Neil’s hands go cold with surprise, and he opens them both for Andrew. “Just for today?”

Andrew shrugs and drops it into his palm. “It’s yours.”

“Why?” Neil asks quietly, pressing two fingers to the ragged edges. The metal is still warm from Andrew’s hand. He thinks of his name looped into a contract, thinks of sharing a microphone with Kevin and bumping fists with Matt. He pictures himself unlocking the door to a home on a residential street and hearing their record playing somewhere inside.

“You live there,” Andrew says, bored. “It’s convenient.”

“It’s more than that,” Neil says fiercely. “You know it is.” He wishes suddenly that he could give Andrew a key to something, an access code to a vault of secrets or a missing piece that would topple Riko’s threat. Before he’d found a stolen twin and a frantic cousin, he had even less of a home than Neil did. The teeth of the key eat into his palm.

“Do not lose it,” Andrew says. “I’m not cutting you another one.”

He knows that he would never misplace this proof of the flimsiness of Andrew’s apathy, this symbol of belonging, this ticket to normalcy. He also knows that Andrew would make him another if he really needed it, and that it means something distinct to both of them.

Andrew watches him mildly. “Go inside. Find your Foxes. If they try and wash your voice out with shitty effects, walk away.”

Neil smiles a little. “You told me yesterday that you don’t care about musical integrity.”

“I don’t want to hear you complain when the track flops,” Andrew says.

“Right.” Neil pops the door open. “I’ll see you at home,” he says tentatively, and when Andrew waves him off, he closes the door between them.

He lets himself uncurl his hand to look at the key, slowly, like it’s a living thing, something he unearthed. He studies the pattern of it, the tangy metallic smell clinging to his fingers.

When he looks up again, Andrew has pulled away. He forces himself to ease the key into his pocket and lower his eyes before the van disappears around the corner.

______

He finds Renee alone in the biggest upstairs studio, sipping demurely from something that smells natural and fruity. She smiles warmly at him when he comes in, and he feels caught in the suspended moment between springing the trap and suffering the consequences.

“You’re early,” she says.

“Interesting. Someone told me I was late.” He shrugs off his jacket and drops it over a music stand.

“Interesting,” she echoes.

Neil crosses his arms. “Where are the others?”

She pauses with the rim of her travel mug at her lips, then lowers it again. “Struggling to get out the door, probably. Allison likes to take her time primping.”

“Okay,” Neil says, uncomfortable to find himself alone with the only person at Palmetto that he can’t really read. “Warm up?”

“If you want,” Renee says easily. Infuriatingly. “Or we could talk, like Andrew so obviously wants us to. I recognize his machinations when I see them.”

Neil considers the slender silver cross at her neck winking in the overhead light. She has the nimble, capable hands of a musician, and the inexplicable ability to garner the respect of someone like Andrew. It’s more than enough to warrant his curiosity.

“What could he possibly want us to talk about?” Neil asks, sitting gingerly in a stray chair across from her.

Renee shrugs. “He’s not usually forthright with details.”

Neil tilts his head and decides all at once to play along. “What is it that he likes so much about you?” he asks.

Renee takes his rudeness in stride, her mouth pursing a little with amusement. “He discovered that we have a lot in common. Rich histories of bad situations and terrible exit strategies. The only difference is that I have my faith and he has his nihilism.”

“And what exactly constitutes a bad situation, for you?”

He’s seen Andrew’s sleeves of scars, he’s seen him wake violently from dreams that never seem to be anything but nightmares, and he’s seen that shallow look in his eyes that says that he’s been hurt as badly as he can be, and everything else is just smoke after fire.

He can’t see any of that on Renee. Her faith is gentle as candlelight, her mannerisms easy as warm water, and he doesn’t like the waxy, tepid feeling of being around her.

Her smile cinches, as if yanked closed by pursestrings. “How much time do you have?”

Neil shrugs. “As much as you do.”

She pulls a hand awkwardly through the hair at her neck — as if, for a moment, she was expecting it to be longer.

Neil waits. Renee sighs. The overhead clock ticks.

She tells him methodically about her mother’s whirlwind of abusive boyfriends, the years that compounded into a deadly pressure that would only give when she took knives to it. She doesn’t hesitate when she tells him about causing her parents’ death, running with gangs until it landed her in juvie, and then into foster homes. For a moment, Neil can see something of Andrew in her face like a familial resemblance.

Renee worries a fingernail in her mouth for half a second, distracted, before she explains what Stephanie Walker did for her. The way music and faith entered her life at once, twin forks on a lightning bolt. Church choir first, and then violin lessons.

Cruelly, he resents her for having someone who desperately fought for her, for letting her mother die so quietly in jail. He also understands, for the first time, why he’s been so unsettled by Renee; she walked out of her tragedy and shut the door. Neil can never latch his while Nathan’s foot is wedged in the gap. He has the most unsettling feeling that Andrew’s door has been wrenched off of its hinges.

“So why aren’t you with Andrew?” he wonders aloud. It’s not the right thing to say, but it’s the only complete thought he’s had since she started talking. Her story reads like a high quality forgery of Andrew’s. Renee complements him just as well in friendship as she does in music.

She smiles like she was expecting this question. “Why would that matter?”

“It doesn’t,” Neil says quickly. “Matter. I don’t care. It just seemed like an obvious fit.”

“We’re kindred spirits in some ways, and I have a hunch that we’ll always be friends. But I’m not his type.”

“I can’t imagine who would be, if not you,” Neil says. He doesn’t mean for it to come out as an accusation, or a compliment, so it sits uncomfortably between the two.

“That’s a puzzle,” she says, smiling impishly.

“You know the rest of your band is placing bets on you?” he asks.

She laughs. “Sure. Gotta pass the time between sets somehow.”

“And it doesn’t bother you?”

“Not at all. Allison’s in on the joke, and that’s half the fun — bluffing together. Finding your allies.”

“In on— in on which joke?” he asks, vaguely frustrated.

Her eyes drift sideways, away from him and towards the door. She pushes up her sleeves carefully. “Andrew and I aren’t just unlikely. We’re impossible.”

“Why impossible?”

She shrugs. “I don’t date men, if I can help it.” Neil barely has time to process this before she adds, “and Andrew doesn’t date women.”

“Oh,” Neil says dumbly.

“I wouldn’t spread that around, though,” she says. “It’s not common knowledge just yet.”

“So why would you tell me?” he asks.

She smiles again. “If he suspected that you were curious about my relationship with him, and still engineered this conversation, I don’t think he would be surprised to know that I’ve told you this particular truth.”

Neil turns this thought over in his head. Andrew puts his secrets at such a remove that he completely avoids being confronted about them. Their impact disperses and melts away before he even makes an appearance.

He thinks about Andrew’s complete disinterest in the fans who throw bras at the stage and shake posters with his name on them. He doesn’t think their gender has anything to do with his apathy, but those instances still tint and change in his memory.

Renee sits good-naturedly through his bout of silence, and then she says, “I hope I helped uh— fill in the blanks a little more for you. I know I don’t really know anything about you, even though we’re all really trying to. Your bandmates though—you breathe the same air and play the same songs day after day, so they can’t help but know you a little. And I know them. So maybe we can be friends someday too.”

Neil feels a distant pang of regret that he won’t be around long enough to prove her right or wrong. He’il be pried from this life with the abruptness of a needle lifting from the middle of a record, and the truth will die, unspoken, on his wasted tongue.

He doesn’t reply, and lukewarm silence stretches between them until Allison comes teetering into the room on platform heels a minute later. She puts her iced coffee on the table and tugs affectionately on the ends of Renee’s hair, and Neil thinks,  _of course_.

A memory surfaces—Andrew twisting dye into his hair and his eyes slipping involuntarily closed—but Dan and Matt parade into the room, arms full of store-bought water and gatorade, and whatever the thought was going to be slips away.

_____

It takes them hours to nail the recording. Neil is dissatisfied with every take, Dan keeps thinking up ideas to beef up their harmonies, and Matt messes with the controls, stripping back the distortion to ‘show off Neil’s pipes’.

They break for lunch at 1pm, and Neil finds himself drifting away from the others, wandering all the way downstairs and through the door, out to the shade where Andrew had left him that morning. He takes out a cigarette that he’d stolen from the console in the van, and the backup lighter from the bowl of keys in the foyer.

He lights up, flame chewing its way towards his fingers. He turns his back against the brunt of the cold and keeps his shoulder to the wall, hair washed forward over his eyes by the wind.

A car rolls up somewhere behind him, and then there’s a snap like a briefcase being closed.

Someone says, “Nathaniel.”

Neil whips around. His fingers tense so that the cigarette nearly snaps in half, but he clings to it and the lighter, the only weapons on his person.

There’s a sleek black SUV parked several spots away, and Riko Moriyama is leaning out of the open side door.

“It is time for us to talk,” he says.

Neil takes a step back. He can see at least two other people in the vehicle, and when he looks up, the shades are drawn over every visible window in the building.

“If you run it will only drag this process out for all of us,” Riko sighs. “We don’t offer civil discussions often. I would take this rare opportunity.”

“You have a knack for making threats sounds like kindnesses,” Neil says. “But then, most bullies do.”

“Get in the car,” Riko says. “Or your real name goes violently public.”

Neil’s teeth clench hard enough to crack. He drops the cigarette on the pavement, and walks forward two steps. “Can I say goodbye?”

“Don’t be melodramatic,” Riko says, and his upper body disappears into the car. Neil follows him in, trying to conceal the way his legs have gone stiff with terror.

In the cab of the car it is just Riko across the expanse of cool leather in the back, and two older men whom Neil doesn’t recognize in the driver’s and passenger’s seats. They peel smoothly out of the parking lot and onto the street.

“They’re expecting me back,” Neil says. One of the men in the front passes Riko an ornate black cane, and he levels it in Neil’s direction.

“I don’t want to hear anything from you until I have finished speaking. In fact, do not talk unless you have been prompted to. I already know everything about you that I care to.”

“I’m at a disadvantage then, since all I know about you is that you are a sadomasochist with the bravado of a much more interesting person.”

Riko raps the cane into the side of Neil’s head with such force that his teeth clatter together and his ears ring.

“I guess pleasantries are over, then,” Neil says.

Riko regards him with distaste. “In another life, perhaps, you could have been an asset. Your father’s reputation precedes him. We might have recruited him if he were as easy to pin down as his son seems to be.”

“What would the yakuza need with another butcher?”

Riko raps him on the hands this time, a warning. “Don’t. Speak.” He watches the redness bloom immediately on Neil’s knuckles with flushed pleasure.

“It would be easy enough to send word to his colleagues and have them at Mr. Hemmick’s front door in a day or two, but I’m not sure that you wouldn’t stir up a mess in the meantime. The publicity from your death could bolster Ausreißer's success. The disappointment from hearing that you’ve left voluntarily is a boycott and a think-piece away from cutting them off at the knees.”

“You want me to leave the band,” Neil says incredulously.

“Of course,” Riko says.

“I’m aware that you have sway in many circles, but not here,” Neil says. “The people in this studio are inside each other’s pockets more than they’ll ever be in yours. They won’t accept this. They won’t.”

“Your interpersonal connections mean nothing to me. Kevin belongs on my team. Andrew and his monsters have been a nuisance, but you are an insufferable offence.”

“So you’re removing your biggest threat?”

Riko’s lip curls. “I found vermin in my house, and I will return it to the sewers where it was born unless it gets out of my way.”

“Even if you did scare me with your posturing, my hands are tied,” Neil says. “I have a contract. He—they won’t let me go.”

Riko’s expression shifts, sand dunes moving in the blowing wind. “You think the drummer will protect you?”

Neil doesn’t reply. He doesn’t want to betray Andrew’s position. He’s like a pipe bomb in a mailbox or a chess piece in check.

“Oh, Neil. He couldn’t even protect himself.”

“What,” Neil says flatly.

Riko waves the cane in a relaxed circle, like he’s deciding where it should land. “I would have thought that someone with your trust issues would have done better research on the people around you.”

Neil stays silent.

“Andrew was a foster kid, yes? It’s chaotic for kids in those crowded houses. So many mouths to feed. Or fuck, in Andrew’s case. I’m sure it was traumatic for little Andrew to be passed around like that, from bed to bed. No wonder he’s so hot and bothered over our intervention. He knows what it looks like when someone’s overpowering him.“

“You’re lying,” Neil says, thunderstruck.

“Mention Drake Spears to your little bodyguard and see how quickly he loses it. Or better yet, just look up the Minyard trial. Andrew can drink the past away, but he can’t erase it from the news. Drake was a fascinating man. Not that rapists in uniform aren’t common, but to break someone like Andrew in I’m sure takes a little extra finesse.”

Neil lunges for him, and Riko counters a beat too late with the cane. Neil clips his eye, and the cane makes contact with his throat a second later. He splutters and reaches, trying to get a hand around Riko’s throat.

“That’s not true,” Neil’s saying, over and over. He twists the flesh on Riko’s neck, scrabbling at his clavicles, physically pressing him to be honest.

Riko looks annoyed, but not deterred as he holds Neil’s hands at bay. “How did you think he got to be a monster, exactly?”

It knocks the breath out of him. His grip sags. He’s aware suddenly that the car has stopped moving, and that anyone in it could kill and dispose of him without so much as interrupting their day.

“You’re not a monster because of what other people do to you,” Neil says, seething.

“Nonetheless. Leave the band, or one of the other members goes missing,” Riko offers. “I don’t care which, but Andrew is so nicely broken in already.”

Neil’s hand darts for him again, and Riko catches it, bored, cracking it back at the wrist. The door pops open at Neil’s back, and he’s hooked halfway out of the car by one of the other men, forearm screaming with pressure where Riko has him clamped in his fist.

Cool sweat breaks out on his brow from the pain as Riko leans down to face level, nails piercing his skin.

Before he can speak, Neil chokes, “you can’t set Andrew up. I won’t let you.”

Riko looks suddenly fatigued, and he lets Neil go so that he rocks back onto the sidewalk. “The more you underestimate my family’s clout. the more people suffer by our hands. You must understand that I am the only thing keeping any of you alive right now.”

“You’re wrong,” Neil says.

“You’re likely to be dead by summer, Nathaniel,” he says evenly. His eyes are black in the shadow of the open car door.

“That’s  _not_  my name.”

“If you want to lose allies and make new enemies in the meantime, it is your choice. But I don’t want to see you on stage again.” He shuts the door quietly between them, and Neil stumbles back several steps, momentum almost overbalancing him.

He watches the SUV depart and thinks of all of the leverage they have over him, how laser focused their will is to scrape Ausreißer off the charts and clip Neil’s loose end. His defiance had almost no affect on them at all. He had rubbed up against Riko’s temper, sure, but it was no harder than squeezing the trigger on a gun that’s already in your hand.

He squints distractedly at the studio several metres behind him, the bustle of midday spilling through the streets. The pleasant murmur of a city heralding in the end of Neil’s life.

He keeps thinking, if Riko knew about Neil’s past, he had no reason to lie about Andrew’s.

He keeps thinking, how could he be stupid enough to imagine that he had the biggest secret in the band — like Andrew wasn’t writing him a roadmap with songs, like his past wasn’t melted down and repurposed into lyrics.

He thinks, the target on his back just swallowed everything and everyone around him.

He thinks,  _I have to talk to Andrew._

______

He can’t bring himself to go back inside and excuse himself from rehearsal. There’s no explanation that they would accept without also understanding that he’s dragged them all down into danger with him.

He let them believe that his problems weren’t active case files and bleeding wounds. He pretended that he could broadcast his voice and maybe the music would be so sacred that no one would come looking for him.

Neil takes the bus home, scraping together spare change from his pocket. He finds his key while he searches, and his heart sinks. When he’s slouched in an aisle seat, he looks down at the shape of his hands, the grit under his nails, the old slice across his pinky, and the key nested in the intersecting lines of his palm.

Rain starts to patter against the window, blurring the colourful shapes of people outside who were hopeful enough to dress for much warmer weather.

He whirs with anxiety, searching for an out so desperately that it becomes a physical act, a shaking and a sweating. He should leave the city while he can still bear to. He owes it to everyone at Palmetto studio to take such a volatile element out of their equation.

It used to be his favourite solution when things turned ugly, dumping his life and name and letting a car carry him to a new one. The ritual of dying his hair and popping in lenses always felt charged with possibility.

Now he can’t let himself consider it. The idea of never seeing Dan or Wymack or Nicky or any of them again, of abandoning his deal with Andrew and dropping his new key into the nearest storm drain — it’s different now.

They were the first people to squint past his face-paint and recognize him as a lost kid. They gave him a key and a home with a locking door and passed him a microphone with the name he chose taped onto the handle. They gave him all sorts of contracts, but most important was the unspoken one that, for a minute, looked like friendship.

He gets back to the house two hours ahead of schedule, but it still feels too late. He thinks about letting himself in but suddenly can’t stand the thought of walking into the home that he’s about to ruin.

He knocks and steps down onto the second stair to give himself some distance. After a minute, someone stirs inside, and then there’s a thumping of footsteps, and the whine of the screen door.

Andrew stares down at him through the mist of rainwater.

“You have a key, don’t you?” he says. Neil looks up into his wan face, studying the way he’s holding himself up with the door, washed out in the bleak light from outside. Neil climbs warily to the top step, feeling a lived-in sadness settle into him.

“You’ve been drinking.”

“Got it in one,” Andrew says, smiling with one half of his face. “So very very perceptive all the time.”

It’s such bad timing that Neil laughs, then holds a trembling hand over his mouth. “I can’t have this conversation when you’re like this,” he says.

“Which conversation is that?” Andrew asks sharply. “Do be precise.”

“I need you sober,” Neil insists.

“You don’t _need me_ anything,” he sneers.

“I’m making you coffee. And then we have to talk about the Moriyamas.”

Andrew looks immediately more alert. His hand slips from the door, and Neil just barely catches it before it closes on him.

“Why are you back early?” Andrew asks slowly. Neil closes his eyes.

“I don’t know. I don’t know why I came.” He should be hitchhiking over state lines. He should be in someone’s truck bed with the rain in his hair. He should be using the cold to forget what warmth feels like.

“Not a good enough answer,” Andrew says. He steps backwards into the entryway and turns, calling “keep trying” over his shoulder. Neil follows him solemnly, nudging the doors closed at his back. He steps out of his shoes while Andrew disappears silently into the kitchen.

When he rounds the corner, Andrew’s sitting on top of the dinky round table by the window, legs crossed beneath him. His cigarettes and lighter are at his side, and a bottle of Smirnoff is open on the chair behind him.

Neil moves towards the coffee maker, but Andrew snaps his fingers at him.

“Tell me why you left recording, no non-answers s’il vous plait,” he says. Neil hesitates, then climbs quietly up onto the table across from him, boosting himself with one socked foot on the cushion of a chair. Andrew looks surprised and red-eyed as Neil settles in, knee to knee.

He swallows thickly. “I have to leave.”

“You just got here,” Andrew points out.

“I have to leave the band,” Neil explains.

He waves this off. “Oh, no, I’m pretty sure we have our contractual claws in you, Neil Josten.”

“There are people, more now than ever, who have… more deadly claws in me.”

Andrew taps his lower lip thoughtfully. “Is it claws though, or is it talons? I know how the Moriyamas enjoy their raven motifs.”

“Riko’s threatening the band.”

“What’s new?” Andrew says.

Everything, he wants to say. Everything’s reaching a new and chilling level of dangerous.

“He stopped me on the street,” Neil says quietly. There’s a hand on his jaw immediately, turning his face towards the overhead light fixture. Neil lets his eyes unfocus in the harsh light. Andrew puts a finger to the bruise from the cane Riko was borrowing. “It’s fine.”

“You will be fine up until the moment that you’re dead,” Andrew spits, one hand moving to inspect Neil’s tender wrist.

“I’m fine if I can walk away,” Neil argues. “I’m okay if I stand up and move on, and that’s what I need to do here.”

“You took some heat from Riko and now you want to run away,” Andrew extrapolates. “Which is great, except you told me you weren’t ready to give up our deal.”

“I kind of assumed all deals were null and void in the event of a deadly threat.”

Andrew uses his leverage on Neil’s chin to tilt their faces close together. “I,” he says, “am a deadly threat. Riko is a little boy playing with his father’s knives.”

Neil flinches at his phrasing, shaking his head. “He has connections I can’t begin to understand. He told me things about my past, about  _yours_ —“

“Did he?” Andrew interrupts. His voice is the kind of inescapable cold that turns all of your exposed skin red, then blue, then black.

Neil tries to turn his face out of Andrew’s grip, and the pressure on him is immediately lifted. “Who’s Drake Spears?” he asks.

“Oh,” Andrew breathes, and then he laughs. “A dead man. Aaron’s gift to me.”

Neil’s face goes lax with surprise. “He killed him?”

“We like to keep our violence in the family,” Andrew says, smiling again, joyless. “Or rather, they did. We ended the cycle.”

“So Riko wasn’t lying about what happened to you,” Neil says slowly.

Andrew takes his cigarettes in one hand and shuffles them against the tabletop for a long moment. “Unlike you, Riko doesn’t always think that lying is in his best interest. It’s not one of his favourite sins.”

Neil stews in this revelation for a moment, trying to outlast the directionless rage streaking through him.

“I wish I’d known, before.”

“Why? So we could waste our time excusing ourselves in miserable circles for things that other people did to us? So I could explain to you what all of my scars mean and make you feel better about yours?”

“So I could have killed him myself,” Neil says fiercely. Andrew eyes him steadily. The rain picks up outside, and Neil can see it coming in through the window cracked over the sink.

“Is that supposed to impress me?”

“It’s not supposed to mean anything to you. It’s just the truth,” Neil says. “If I can’t kill my own demons, I—would’ve liked to kill yours.”

“Much too late for that,” Andrew shrugs. “Not too late to stay here with us. If Riko threatens you out of the band on his first try, then you’re not as tenacious as I thought you were.”

“I’m afraid,” Neil says, “that someone else will suffer for my pride.”

“It’s not pride, it’s trust,” Andrew says, and then his face clouds over like he’s sobering up, remembering himself. “In case you’ve forgotten since I reminded you two minutes ago, we have a deal. Protection for participation.”

He shouldn’t believe that this volatile, five foot nothing stage performer could rebuff the yakuza, but he does. He can’t look at Andrew’s eery, wavering certainty without wanting badly to trust him.

“Right,” Neil agrees, feeling hours-old tension ebb out of his shoulders. He came here, he realizes, knowing that Andrew would give him a reason to stay. “I’ll wait it out. But you have to promise me that you’ll watch your back.”

Andrew shakes his head and pulls a cigarette from the pack. “He can’t touch me,” he says, flicking his lighter open. His eyes are hazy as he props one hand up and smokes on autopilot. Neil’s not certain that he knows for sure who Andrew’s talking about anymore.

The tour isn’t for another couple of weeks. He can keep his face out of the news and slog his way through all of this new information, maybe turn over a solution somewhere in the muck. At the very least, he can spend these final weeks pretending that he’s not afraid of the dark at the end of the tunnel where the rest of his life should be.

______

 

_It’s the bark, not the bite_

_the prelude to a fight_

_the gleam of bared teeth_

_when they catch the low light_

_the revving beneath_

_the thought that you might_

_with the last of your breath_

_get our ending right_

Neil turns the demo down on the car radio, embarrassed, and Dan grins at him from the driver’s seat.

“That’s a sexy little lyric.”

“Shut up,” he says, rolling his eyes.

“I like the weird synth in the background, that’s baller,” Matt pipes up from behind them.

Nicky groans. “Don’t tell Kevin that, he thought he was a fucking genius for stringing together six notes by ear.”

Dan laughs brightly, easing onto the freeway that’ll carry them out of the city.

Their album was released at midnight, and they’ve spent the morning watching the charts and listening to Nicky read out reviews as they were published, waiting to see if they’d be rejected or absorbed into the musical bloodstream.

It was exhilarating to see the finished product saturating their little corner of music culture, to watch people forming opinions, and to pop up in playlists and news feeds. Someone had already posted a guitar cover of one of their tracks before noon. 

Neil watched the locked door of their house and hoped furiously that Riko wouldn’t take this new music as defiance and show up to drag him away. Foxes had shown up instead, with congratulatory champagne and a novelty card for Neil that read “baby’s first album”.

Both Ausreißer and Foxes were scheduled to take the weekend off before they’re all launched into promotions and tours on opposite coasts. Dan had suggested a Palmetto-wide retreat to lake Jocassee, and Neil had jumped at the opportunity to dodge the pressure from the Moriyamas and corral everyone out of harms way.

“This is going to be such a rowdy time,” Nicky says, chin tucked onto the shoulder of Neil’s chair. “I can’t believe you convinced Andrew to come.”

“Yeah, what the hell,” Matt says. “How did you manage that?”

Neil shrugs. “I asked.”

“Oh, you asked,” Dan says, nose scrunching under her sunglasses. “Do you know how long we were playing nice with the monsters before you showed up?”

“Neil’s got that magic touch,” Nicky says.

“Just how magic a touch are we talking?” Matt asks slyly.

“Don’t,” Neil warns.

“He won’t let us bet on them,” Nicky complains. “He’s just like, not fun.”

“It’s bewildering to me that you clowns are wasting your time when we all know who Andrew’s into,” Dan says. She keeps talking, and Neil hears Renee’s name, but he’s uninterested in the direction the conversation is taking. He looks distractedly out at the sun-split highway.

He thinks of how quiet the other car must be, stacked with supplies, caught in that constant vortex of tension between the twins, plus Kevin with his headphones on as always. Or what Renee and Allison talk about, tucked into Allison’s baby-pink convertible, the wind catching their bleached hair.

“Damn, are they passing us already?” Nicky asks, and Neil looks back in time to notice the massive shape of the van swerving past on their left. He catches the tail end of Aaron flipping them off, and Nicky laughs, craning into the front to return the gesture.

“They left like half an hour later than us, what the hell,” Dan says, revving a little, reluctant to fall behind.

“Andrew’s driving,” Neil says. The van jolts awkwardly into the lane in front of them, and Neil smiles as it streaks ahead. “They’ll beat us by a mile.”

“If they don’t crash first,” Dan grumbles.

“Look at it this way — if it’s not that, it’ll just be some other disaster,” Matt says. “That’s what you sign up for with the monsters.”

“You say disaster, I say a great time. Am I right, Neil?” Nicky asks, flicking at his shoulder to get his attention.

“I’m staying impartial.”

“You literally can  _not_  fool me,” Nicky says, affronted. “You love having an opinion.”

“He doesn’t want to incur your wrath by agreeing with us,” Dan teases, winking sideways at him.

“ _My_  wrath? This is the guy who taunted Riko Moriyama on sight, and you think he’s afraid of  _me_?”

“We all are,” Matt says solemnly, and Nicky socks him in the arm.

They keep bickering, but Neil mostly tunes them out. A song that he helped write is still playing at half volume from the sound system, rounded out by Kevin’s deft bass solo. The car is warm enough to lull him to sleep, and he can see the rest of the Ausreißer crew fading into the scorched horizon ahead.

______

They arrive in staggered bursts to a spacious cabin, swallowed in overhanging trees on all sides. It’s two stories high, with a broad, wrap-around porch — courtesy of Allison’s string-pulling. 

The twins are sharing a bench when they pull up, talking seriously, and Neil has to squint to make sure he’s seeing them correctly. Three hours in a car together and against all odds they’re still sharing space.

No one bothered to unpack the van, so Neil keeps himself busy by hopping into the back and pulling out duffel bags. Allison and Renee arrive soon after with coolers full of booze and perishables, and by the time everything has been lugged inside, there are three guitars propped up and abandoned in the foyer.

It’s surprisingly easy, once all of them are talking at once. Kevin drinks enough to stay loose, which always seems to relax Aaron in turn. The girls sit on the floor of the dining room while Matt unpacks groceries. Nicky chatters about getting everyone hammered so they can play “sweet, genre-fucked music” together. Someone lights a joint, and it makes the rounds.

Neil hops up on the kitchen counter, and Andrew leans against the fridge beside him.

Neil relaxes at the sight of him. “Aren’t you glad you came?” he asks, a little louder than he intended. He can sense the others pretending not to eavesdrop, their conversation dropping and then starting back up again, overly bright.

“Remains to be seen,” he replies.

“You were talking to Aaron,” he says. Andrew stares passively back at him. “I’ve never seen you speak one on one like that.”

“It was a long drive.”

Neil hesitates. “Did you tell him—“

“Andrew,” Nicky calls. “I’m comin’ through with groceries, can you free up the fridge?”

Andrew moves wordlessly aside, and then all the way out of the room. Neil watches him go with a dull sort of disappointment. For someone who is so frequently difficult to parse, Andrew is such an obvious font of honesty and clarity that speaking to him sometimes feels like an antidote to his own lies.

“Come on, Neil,” Renee trills. “We’re talking about the collab.”

“I want to hear the track,” Kevin says.

“You want to critique it,” Neil counters, wandering closer.

Dan throws a hand out towards him. “Exactly!”

“I think I have a right to know how you’re utilizing my lead singer.”

“Oh jesus, Kevin’s going to start talking about music theory, isn’t he?” Allison says. “I’m gonna need to drink so much more.” Dan cracks up, passing her a mickey of spiced rum.

“We all do,” she agrees, raising a full bottle in toast. “It’s a Palmetto tradition. Work hard, play hard.”

“Thanks coach,” Matt snorts.

“C’mon, bring it in.” They all tilt bottles together, some of them unopened, eyes rolling. Neil can see Andrew watching from the next room, and when they drink, he takes a drag from his cigarette.

______

Neil drinks too much. 

He’d half planned on it, but his stomach is empty and his anxiety is just barely held down by sobriety, and it all gets to him so fast. His elbows keep chafing against other people’s, and his fear keeps blinking back at him from between branches outside and through passing headlights and in his own reflection.

They’re all seven or eight drinks deep when someone brings out a guitar, and then it’s a chaos of bad singing that coasts into real singing, someone upstairs laughing hysterically with someone else, someone on the porch with a bong.

He likes how it feels, the old safety of staying numb, like the back of the bars where nobody knows you, so you don’t have to bother to know yourself, and there’s nothing to be afraid of except the throb of a hangover at the end of the night.

But it’s different, now. Dan gets in close and thumbs both his cheeks, and Allison puts little, almost undetectable braids in his hair. Matt tells him how happy he is that they’re all together over and over again. The longer Neil looks over at Andrew the more he’s aware that he’s looking for something that isn’t there.

Nicky looks solemnly into his eyes in the bathroom mirror and asks to see his tongue piercing. There’s a strange moment, when he opens his mouth, where he thinks Nicky might grab him by the tongue.

“Come here, come here, come here,” someone says, and Neil looks at Allison’s reflection where she’s hanging in through the doorway. “Convince Andrew to play us something.”

“I can't,” Neil’s mouth says. He tries again. “He won’t.”

“He does whatever you want,” Nicky says, looking much too serious.

“You—no,” Neil says. “You guys ask for whatever you want. I ask what he wants.“

“Whatever,” Allison says. “Semantics. Come out here.”

Nicky puts his hands briefly on Neil’s hips to sidle by into the hallway, and he and Allison chatter all the way back to the sitting room. Neil looks blearily at his reflection. His hair is so long now, it softens the angles of his father’s features. Makes his eyes look less painfully blue. He blinks, and breathes, and tries to think about nothing.

His feet carry him out to the rest of them. Dan cheers when he enters the room. She’s so flushed, and even though she’s sitting, Matt’s holding her steady.

Andrew’s sitting in an armchair by the fireplace, his posture relaxed, lips wet, drink in hand. Neil walks as steadily as he can to his side. The room goes nearly silent.

“Will you play something?”

Andrew looks up at him flatly. “Why would I?”

“I want to hear you sing,” Neil admits.

“And?” He takes a sip of his drink.

Neil shrugs. “I’ll trade you something for it,” he offers.

After a long moment, Andrew says “I’m not interested.”

“I know you’ve been writing new lyrics,” he says softly.

Andrew watches him for a minute, then nods towards the place where his notebook is sitting unassumingly on the coffee table. “Then sing them yourself.”

Neil considers this. He retrieves the book and holds it in both hands, giving Andrew time to back out. He doesn’t, and someone breathes out behind him.

“Okay,” Neil says. “Fine.”

He flips to the centre and finds blank pages, then beyond that, two that are flush with words and annotations. There are chords written out for four more pages after that, and then just scores and scores of melodies and poems and the lucky places where they meet.

He thumbs through songs he recognizes and new, title-less ones, still standing, everyone watching his search with interest.

He comes to a page near the back with the title  _burn this_ , and it reads:

 

_Hands off never used to be a bad thing_

_It would be better if I never heard you sing_

_I know it’s winter, you can’t tell me that it’s spring_

_I want you without wanting anything._

Then a few lines are scratched out before the next fragmented stanza. Neil looks up into Andrew’s face, and he’s already staring back, eyebrows hitched so, so slightly together.

Neil crosses the room, and wrestles a little portable synth out of his bag, carrying it over to the couch. Some of the members of Foxes ‘ooh’ dramatically.

He nudges it on, cracks his knuckles, and toggles a couple of switches. He holds the book open on his knee, and starts to arpeggiate the suggested chords that Andrew’s written above each line.

He sings, improvising the melody, those first four lines and then —

 

_It was too easy not to feel_

_when the drugs still told me you weren’t real_

_I always knew you were here to steal_

_We started this, me back on my heels_

_and you—beneath me._

There’s more, but Neil can’t bring himself to keep singing. His throat sticks and his vision goes spotty.

“Kind of a bummer,” Matt says.

“I think it’s pretty,” Dan says softly.

“Hard to believe the monster wrote it,” Allison says.

“You must know by now that we can write good lyrics,” Kevin says, irritated.

Aaron says something, but Neil’s still stuck staring down at the words on the page. Something is angrily crossed out in the second stanza, just completely struck through, unreadable. He feels remarkably sober all of the sudden, and he trudges to the precipice of an understanding so large that he has to step away from it, or he’s sure it’ll call him down to his death.

Andrew stands, somewhere in the field of Neil’s vision, and lets himself out onto the porch.

“Whoops,” Matt says, when the door closes behind him. “Do you think we took it too far?”

“He offered the book up,” Allison points out.

“To me,” Neil says.

“Well, yeah, but I think ‘sing them yourself’ was pretty self explanatory,” Dan says, missing the point. “So are we supposed to know who that was about?”

Neil stands, and the synth slides off his lap and into the crease between couch cushions. He walks to the kitchen and pours himself a cup of water, downing it all. Then another. He tries to remember exactly what the lyrics said and finds himself less and less certain.

For the second time that week, he thinks, knees knocking with terrible anticipation,  _I have to talk to Andrew_.

______

He finds him curled on the bench outside, drenched in the yellow light from an exposed bulb, still nursing the same whiskey from before. He looks up with what Neil now recognizes as carefully tailored interest.

“Why does Nicky think that you’ll do whatever I ask?” he asks, voice wavering.

Andrew taps his fingers erratically on the rim of his glass. “Presumably because your track record has been good so far.”

“That doesn’t really answer my question.”

Andrew’s lips purse. “Then ask a new question.”

“Fine. I’ll play,” Neil says. “What was that song about?”

“It was about wanting something that I can’t have.”

“I didn’t think you wanted anything.”

“No,” Andrew agrees. “Except maybe to see if you sound as good in bed as you do on stage.”

Neil sits down, hard. He’s half-surprised when gravity still works, and the wicker footstool catches his weight.

“You like me,” he says weakly.

“Not really,” Andrew replies, expressionless. “Want and dislike are not mutually exclusive.”

Neil dry swallows a couple of times. He thinks of their eyes connecting darkly in a bathroom mirror, Andrew’s fingertips gliding over his scars, the passenger seat left open for him, his mouth and then Andrew’s on the same flask. He thinks of lyrics on their own album about running and lying and wanting without taking, and he remembers the deal that has kept him upright and safe and sane for so long.

Andrew’s amused interest when he’s high, the cryptic things that Nicky said to him on the night they met, the conversations where he gives away his secrets but doesn’t feel like he’s losing anything, it all completely restructures in his head.

He’s dizzy, still drunk, one foot in the reality where he was little more than a hindrance to Andrew, and the other in one where he writes songs about how much he wants him.

“You didn’t tell me,” Neil says dumbly. “You never said.”

Andrew shrugs. “There’s no point,” he says. “I’ve thought about it. Written about it. But I know better.”

“Okay,” Neil says, even though it’s not. Andrew shifts in his seat, and Neil watches his broad hands, his shiny lower lip, his squared shoulders. The night chirps and smokes with faraway firewood, pitch dark beyond the line separating the porch from the wilderness. Andrew might be the brightest thing for a thousand miles. “Okay,” he says again, but this time it splits in his mouth, and he reaches for Andrew’s face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that's a doozy huh go ahead and drop me a comment if you want me to like........ resolve this............ maybe make them kiss on the lips or something


	8. Chapter 8

Andrew waits for his palm to make contact, for Neil to misstep and make everything easy again, but his fingers hover an inch from Andrew’s skin. He can feel the heat coming off of him, the little shield blocking out the breeze. 

His hand is a warm bed, and Andrew is so tired.

“What are you doing?”

“I don't know,” Neil whispers. He sucks in his bottom lip. He’s leaning out of the light, face cut in half by shadow, and Andrew can't tell if his eyes are clear or not. He peels the hand from the air beside his cheek and Neil lets him.

Their hands are heavy together for a moment, paperweights trying to keep each other down.

“I’m not interested in ‘I don’t know’,” he tells him. He’s not going to let Neil lay his confusion and curiosity over him until they both suffocate.

“But you’re interested in me,” Neil says, stupidly, like he still can't believe it.

“Sometimes,” Andrew admits. “Sometimes you are intolerable.”

Neil holds his own bare arms. “Sometimes is more than I would have expected.”

“I’m not dealing with your self-pity right now,” he says viciously. He’s preoccupied with his own.

He keeps thinking of the way Neil’s mouth had formed the words he’d written about him. Andrew had thought them with such hopeless anger, but Neil had sung them with such rapture.

“It’s not self pity, it’s—“ he cuts himself off. “Maybe I’m interested too.” He leans forward into the light, and the full force of what he’s just said hits Andrew like a fender bender, when you have to pull over and assess the damage.

He can’t help the way his face takes on colour, the curl of hope that immediately dilutes in the cool air. “You’ve been drinking all night,” he says. “You sat through Kevin’s entire sermon on atonal improv. Forgive me if I can’t trust your judgement.”

Neil’s mouth betrays his feelings, as always. His lips part, and he says, “I don’t feel drunk anymore.”

“You don’t know what you feel.”

“I do,” Neil says, then looks surprised at himself for saying it.

“I’m not doing this with you right now,” Andrew says.

Neil falls silent, but he still looks so keyed up, so flush with the edge of something that Andrew’s been dangling off of for months. He thinks, if he had pulled his hand closer instead of easing it away, would this cracked ice between them have melted? Would there be anything between them at all?

“I used to have a piano teacher,” Neil says, “who told me not to start playing until I was sure that I could get every note right.” He looks out into the darkness for just a moment, and then squarely at Andrew. “I would move my hands to the right places but I wouldn’t press down. Sometimes we would sit for twenty minutes like that.”

“So—what? You’re hoping I’ll give you sheet music?”

“I just—I don’t want to be afraid to play because some notes will be wrong, I just like the song. I just want—“ he cuts off again, taking a deep breath and adjusting his posture, almost like he’s preparing to sing. He gestures helplessly, and then his hand curls back up into a fist and his back bows. “I’m tired of wasting so much time.”

“You knew you were signing your time away when you joined Ausreißer.”

“Right,” Neil says ruefully. “So why does it feel like you’re trying to  _buy_ me time, and I’m not using it properly?”

Andrew’s insides turn over sympathetically. His body has understood something that he has not, yet. 

“You’re delusional,” he says. 

He puts his glass down on the porch slats at his feet, and the static in his head keeps turning up and up and up. He feels like he’s writing a song, and it’s all the way up to his mouth and it hurts, to keep it in.

“People have said the same thing about you,” Neil says.

Andrew nods. “The only delusion I’m entertaining is that your voice is worth the trouble it causes.”

“I’m not sure that I believe that, anymore,” Neil says softly.

“I didn’t ask,” Andrew says, and then he puts both hands on Neil’s jaw, and kisses him.

Finally, the deafening, deadening static turns into solid sound. The wind stops blowing, and Neil’s mouth hitches open beneath his, miraculous, like a door unsticking.

Neil has a history of standing in Andrew’s way, moving all of the furniture in his life an inch to the left. But somehow this is the simplest thing he’s ever done. It’s like he put down his drumsticks and went for the drums directly with his hands. He can feel the skin of them and hear their heartbeat and it’s beyond music and beyond pain.

Andrew can feel Neil moving, craning up into the hands on his face, and he holds onto him. He can’t think of anyone who’s moved him to such slowness before. 

He usually likes kissing because it’s a fight where he has the upper hand, but this feels more like a truce. This is the refuge where an armistice happens. This is the kind of kiss that ends a war.

He slides a hand up into Neil’s hair. The ball of his tongue piercing clicks behind Andrew’s teeth, and he breathes, shuddering, into Neil’s mouth. His foot moves involuntarily, and he hears his whiskey knock over and splash across the deck. He feels a hand loop unsteadily into the sleeve of his sweater, and realization trickles down the back of his neck.

He forces himself to relax his hand at the base of Neil’s skull and pull away.

Neil bobs after him. Andrew looks closely at the brown hair blowing into his eyes, aware again of the dark, cresting sound of the air rushing through trees. His hand slips up and pushes Neil’s hair back from his face.

“I shouldn’t be doing this,” he says hoarsely.

“You said,” Neil starts, swallowing and closing his eyes briefly. “You said you wanted something you couldn’t have. But you can. I’m telling you you can have it.”

“I can’t  _have_ you. You’re too drunk to give me a real answer, and I’m not going to be that fucking person. I won’t be.”

Neil tilts his head, considering. “I would’ve said yes earlier, too.”

“That’s not how this works,” Andrew snaps.

“Then give me a few hours,” Neil says simply. “And we try this again.” Andrew doesn’t reply, and Neil leans close. Something about getting kissed has hooded his eyes and made him move slow, like he hasn’t quite acclimated to the air outside of Andrew’s mouth. “Last week you told me to choose trust. Can you do the same?”

“I don’t even trust you when you’re dead sober.”

He watches Neil tamp down a smile. “That stings a lot less now that you’ve  _kissed_  this mouth.”

“Doesn’t make it any less irritating.”

Neil snorts, standing up on wobbly legs and side-stepping the puddle from Andrew’s upended drink. He stops just before the door, his face soft. “Thanks,” he says, “for not being what people think of you. It’s been a long time since someone’s surprised me in a good way.”

Andrew’s stomach riots and swaps with his lungs. “Leave,” he says, urgently needing the space.

Neil does smile this time, a spasm of unchecked feeling, and then he taps gently on the doorway and slips through it.

Andrew slumps backwards in his seat, lips stinging. He can’t process the last five minutes all the way through without overheating and shutting down.

He’s used to all of his senses going dull for periods of time. He loses feeling like he used to lose time. The trees look browner and the alcohol burns softer. This time though, he’s feeling so much that it’s lurching ahead of the booze and the brewing storm on the air, and it’s all he can focus on.

Neil used to be easy, because he was impossible. He could do the equation ten different ways and still get the same wrong answer. 

And now a whole variable has changed, and the answer is completely different.

Now the whole murky pool of his thoughts has been drained, and there’s a mosaic at the bottom, and it’s gleaming and solid under his feet.

He has to remind himself that the bottom of an empty pool is still a pit. The ladder is halfway up, and he’s stuck here.

He looks out into the whistling darkness, and rain starts to pitter on the overhanging porch roof, fighting down through the dense trees to the earth.

He’s been sitting in the storm for a long time when there’s a peel of laughter inside, and then a shriek as the power blinks and goes out.

He grips the arms of his chair tightly, and closes his eyes so he can hear better. The worst things always seem to come out of the dark. He’s tired of being taken by surprise tonight.

There’s a ruffle of footsteps inside, and then a smack when the door is opened too fast.

“Sorry,” Nicky hisses.

“What do you want?”

“Are you—can you—there’s a backup generator in the basement, and I’m—shut up Allison, I’m asking him—“

“Then go use it,” Andrew says.

“Could you?” Nicky asks. “Renee went to bed, Dan’s too drunk to read a manual, and the rest of us are spooked. You’re not afraid of anything, come on.”

He grits his teeth, suddenly resentful. He’s disoriented by the pounding rain and complete darkness, and so unsure of so many things that he’s almost shaking, but he stands up anyway.

“Yes!” Nicky cheers. “Yes, okay, thank god. I thought I was going to have to send Neil out here to convince you.”

Andrew pushes past him into the over-warm entryway.

He can hear a few Foxes nearby, moving shadows in the sparse moonlight. They go quiet around him, as usual. He can tell Neil isn’t with them because he would be rallying them out of their strangeness. He would be commandeering the situation for himself, pulling them all through whether they wanted to go or not.

“Why not send him down instead?”

“I dunno,” Nicky’s disembodied voice says. “I don’t know where he went. Plus I kind of get the feeling that he’s anti-basement. He can barely sit still downstairs at home.”

“He doesn’t trust a room with one exit,” Andrew says. “ He doesn’t like to be backed into a corner.”

“Well, like. Does anyone?”

Andrew pulls the heavy basement door open and pushes it towards Nicky.

“Hold this.”

Nicky drops his voice to say, “are you guys okay? Did he figure it out?”

Andrew doesn’t reply.

He steps down blindly onto the first step, and it creaks comfortingly beneath his foot. He feels his way to the bottom from there, hands on both bannisters, listening hard through the rain and wind for anything else disturbing the stillness.

There’s a little rectangular window across from the stairs, and the rain is tapping hard against it, trying to get in. A dollop of thunder smacks down on top of the cabin and drowns everything else out for a moment. Lightning follows, a white slash in the dark. 

When he was a kid, he used to think of thunder as the incompetent villain giving himself away. Lightning was the hero, striking at the source of the noise with his flashing sword.

When he was a little older, he thought of lightning as the punishing blow when the thunder sobbed too loud.

A little older, and he didn’t think about it at all.

Another clumsy clap of thunder, and then the lights flood on around him.

Before his eyes can adjust, a voice says, “Andrew?” 

He startles and turns in place, almost fishtailing in his haste to get to high ground.

It’s Neil though, of course, where none of them expected him, sitting on a couple of overturned crates next to the humming generator.

He squints at him in the light from the low-watt bulb swinging overhead. “Why are you down here?”

He looks sheepish. “I needed somewhere quiet to sober up.”

“You didn’t hear me coming down?”

“I didn’t know who you might be,” Neil says tightly. Andrew watches his face, a little ashen in the gloom. Being alone underground when the power was choked won’t have helped Neil’s anxiety any.

“You turned on the generator,” he says dumbly.

Neil shrugs. “I’ve lived in some dives, and I’ve seen a lot of shoddy electricity. Manual start-ups have kept me alive once or twice.”

“So?”

“So what?”

“Why are you so scared?”

“I was just thinking,” Neil says. He’s breathing erratically, and his hair looks tugged out of place, maybe still from where Andrew tucked it back from the wind. “You wrote… all those lyrics about me.”

“Some of them, not all.”

“Right,” Neil says flippantly. “When we were planning the album, do you know how long I had to sit with a thought before I got it down on paper? How long you have to want something to write down that you want it?”

“Don’t flatter yourself. The words don’t mean more because I scribbled them out to meet a deadline.”

“Stop lying,” Neil says.

“ _You_ can’t tell  _me_  to stop lying.”

“I like that you don’t lie,” Neil says. “I think, if I’d gotten to have another life, I would’ve hated lying too.”

“You must still be drunk.”

“I’m completely fucking sober,” Neil snaps. “And I think you are too. Am I wrong?”

“Usually.”

“Am I?” Neil asks again.

“I spilled half of my only drink on the porch, what do you think?”

He bites his lip nervously. “I think this is more dangerous than I realized.”

“Fine,” Andrew says, heart sinking. “We can bury it.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Neil says. “Tell me you’ll stop writing about me.” He’s oddly focused on this. He’s convinced himself that music and feelings are the same, and you can’t have one without the other. Like if Andrew burns his lyrics, he burns the meaning out of them. As if he wouldn’t have tried that already.

“This is irrelevant.”

“I don’t think it is.”

“I’ll stop,” he says, watching Neil’s shoulders relax.

“Okay,” Neil breathes. “Okay. Then I think—I still want this.”

Andrew steps closer, hair standing on end. Neil drifts up to meet him, and one of his crates clatters to the floor. “Yes or no?”

“I just said—“

“I don’t care what you said unless it was a yes or a no.”

Neil’s mouth quirks just slightly, dented from neutral into something else entirely. “Yes.”

Andrew takes him by the wrists.

He walks Neil backwards until he makes contact with the wall just below the window. Lightning splits his face. Andrew kisses him to seal him back together. He lifts both of Neil’s hands and holds them just over his head, hard.

“Don’t touch,” he says against his lips. He slides his hands down Neil’s chest to his hips and gathers him close. “Still yes?”

“Yes,” Neil says breathlessly. Andrew presses in again, hands full of him, fingertips sliding over the skin below the hem of Neil’s shirt. He sucks his bottom lip into his mouth and Neil gasps for air like he does between measures of music.

There’s no drink to knock over this time, but he still feels like something’s upended.

A minute, and he can tell that Neil’s arms are sagging from the strain of holding them above his own head. When Andrew looks up to check, he’s gripping the windowsill with both hands. His fingers are slippery from the water seeping through, and Andrew can’t stop staring.

It’s uncanny, the sounds and the heat and the bunched muscles. It can’t be possible that the fantasy can disperse into reality and make things true. Nothing ever happens that way.

It’s almost terrible, to know that the longing was always a sliding door away from this: Neil relaxing under his hands, Neil ducking his head and dragging kisses down his neck.

His hands fly to his hair to yank him back a little, and Neil stares at him from under his lashes, swept away in it, head tilted back exactly where Andrew wants it.

“Andrew?” Nicky calls, from above. “D’you get lost down there?”

He loosens his grip and tries to swallow. “No,” he says, just loud enough to be heard. The last thing he needs is for Nicky to see them and decide he needs to play mediator.

He steps back, and Neil’s hands melt off the window and back down to his sides. He wipes the rainwater off on his shirt, dragging it back into place as he does so.

Andrew takes another step back, then another. 

He makes himself turn and walk up the stairs away from this new agreement that they’ve made. He can’t get away from the memory of Neil’s face when the lights came on though, the hours he spent in the dark trying to convince himself that love songs don’t mean anything at all.

______

The morning is cool and green, but the torrential downpour of last night has broken like a fever. Andrew has the attic bedroom, in the crook of the roof where no one can be bothered to pull the ladder down and follow him up.

Last night he let Neil climb into his notebook, take out his ideas, and try them on. He’d tasted his whiskey mouth and then his ginger ale and peppermint one, he’d fisted his colour-damaged hair and watched him consciously hang his composure up like an overcoat to let himself be touched.

Andrew had skulked up to his room, trying first to be asleep and then to be awake, and finding that they were both non-starters. He’d relived Neil’s tongue piercing flat to his adam’s apple until he gave up, jerked off, and passed out just as the sun was coming up.

Now, he crawls out the window and onto the slope of the roof, feet poking out from sweatpants, hoodie zipped up over his bare chest. He lights a cigarette, half surprised when it manages to catch fire with all the moisture in the air.

His toes curl against the grey slats just above the eavestrough. It’s amazing how wired he feels, right on the cusp of falling. The only ways out are the acrobatic climb back to the window or the leap to the ground below. The wet pavement taunts that it’s closer than it is. Gravity, missing the ceaseless power of its rainstorm, tries to nudge him over and pour him down too.

It’s late morning when the door below him shudders open and Aaron’s blond bedhead appears beyond the crest of the roof. He wanders out towards the car, and Andrew flicks his cigarette so it bounces off the windshield. 

Aaron barely startles. He sighs and turns around, shielding his eyes to look up at him.

“Where are you going?” Andrew asks.

“It’s none of your business.”

“It’s my car.”

Aaron crosses his arms. “Only technically,” he sniffs. Then, “I’m gonna go to the lake. It’s supposed to be why we’re here.”

“Supposed to be,” Andrew repeats, fishing for whatever’s just behind those words.

Aaron rocks back against the van, face level with the side mirror. “I know you’re only here because Neil asked you to be. I don’t understand why you keep listening to him.”

“I know you’re not going to the lake,” Andrew counters. “You’re going to find somewhere with reception to talk to your girlfriend.”

Aaron looks crestfallen. “You don’t have to talk about her like she’s a filthy bad habit.”

Andrew thinks maybe that’s the only way he understands romance.

“You don’t have to treat her like one,” Andrew says. “By sneaking out and stealing my keys.”

“Yeah right,” Aaron says loudly. “You didn’t give me much of a choice.”

“A choice is exactly what I gave you.”

“An ultimatum,” Aaron corrects. “Don’t make me return the favour.”

Andrew rolls his eyes.

“I’m serious,” Aaron says, gesturing, agitated. “We all heard those things you wrote.”

“And you think you understand them.”

“Of course I fucking do, Andrew, I’ve loved people too.”

He sits with that for a moment, trying to swallow around the implications of it and finding that his mouth is bone dry.

“I’m gonna go, and you’re gonna let me,” Aaron tells him. He manually unlocks the driver’s side door and pops it open. “And you’re going to be careful with Neil. He’s still the guy who provokes people to violence every time he opens his mouth, and you don’t need that.”

Andrew knows all this, so he still doesn’t reply. Eventually Aaron gets in the car and shuts the door behind him with a sound like bubblegum popping.

He hates talking to Aaron like this, when they circle each other and go through the motions of the same fight over and over. Jab. Jab. Dodge. Hair pull, exactly where it hurts. Right hook that never lands.

Yesterday was the first time that they’d spoken about something other than the Spears lawsuit, or Tilda, or the Katelyn-shaped knot in their relationship. It’s uncanny, the way Aaron talks about music like he used to talk about medical school. His passion completely relocated when he realized that he could save someone’s life without having to prove how smart he was.

Sometimes there are soft sounds at Andrew’s door at night, and he can tell that Aaron is sitting outside, keeping watch. He’s never caught him at it, but he knows the shape of his brother’s shadow.

Twenty minutes later, Dan and Matt come out of the cabin, talking cheerfully about their plans for a quick and dirty 1 pm breakfast before they hike to the nearest falls. He can tell from a distance that they’re hyper casual, Dan in Matt’s sweatshirt, her short hair in a tiny little ponytail. Matt’s wearing sandals, and the gel from last night is loose in his hair.

They wonder about nearby restaurants and what footwear is best for the rain-soaked forests. They find the van missing and they wonder about that too.

It’s so simple that he thinks for a second that he might like to hear what Neil wonders about, and then he thinks of what Aaron said before.  _I’ve loved people too._ He feels very stupid all of the sudden. He’s realized something much, much too late.

“Oh, Andrew, jesus,” Dan says, clutching her chest. “I didn’t see you.”

“What the hell?” Matt says. “You look like a fucking bird of prey perched up there like that.”

“I’m smoking.”

“Crack?” Dan says. “I don’t know why else you’d be on the steepest, slipperiest roof I’ve ever seen in my life.”

He shrugs.

“Don’t stay up there all day, okay,” she says. “Kevin’s moaning about his hangover, and Neil’s being super weird.”

“Not my problem.”

“I guess,” Matt says, packing their bags into his car. “But they’re like, your pets. I don’t know how to get them to stop whining.”

“I think Renee made coffee,” Dan says innocently. “If you want any. It’s that expensive honey almond shit.”

Andrew doesn’t reply, and she rolls her eyes and climbs into the passenger’s seat.

“Also, we’re having a fire tonight, and you’re obligated by law to come sit through it,” Matt tells him, not giving him a chance to refuse before he follows her inside.

He watches their car back out, trying to fathom how Neil could act any weirder than he already does. 

Spreading out onto his back, he thinks about detaching himself from every miniature drama playing out in the strangeness of the cabin, and pursuing this thing with Neil until it runs dry.

He rolls onto his knees, ignoring the pang of fear that it sets off, and pulls himself up to the windowsill.

Only when he gets one dewey foot down onto the bare wood does he realize that Neil’s there, again, sitting in his unmade bed.

“You’re starting to infringe on my space,” Andrew tells him, swinging his other leg over the sill.

“Sorry,” Neil says, obviously unrepentant. “I kind of don’t know what to do with myself.”

“We’re at a cabin. Go to the lake.”

“I’m not a fan of the water,” Neil says, but he’s starting to smile a little, as Andrew gets closer, this stupid, coy little thing.

Andrew lifts Neil’s face up by the jaw. “You don’t like water and you brought us to an 8000 acre lake in the middle of a thunderstorm?”

“I like seclusion,” he shrugs.

“You like being unfindable,” Andrew says. “You found the darkest corner in the basement of a cabin in the woods to sulk in.”

“You’re the one who was huddled out on the rooftop.”

“Some people,” he says, “were getting on my nerves.”

“I could get on them again,” Neil says cheekily, and his smile widens when Andrew’s face drifts down towards his.

“Still yes?” 

“Uh-huh,” Neil says, eyes already closing. Andrew watches the waiting-to-be-kissed look on his face for a beat, savouring it. 

He pecks his lips, watching his eyelids flutter through the contact. He kisses him again, for longer, and lowers them both into the mess of blankets. He feels like he has arms full of sunken treasure, like he’s easing to the ocean floor with it all, rich and doomed.

He fixes Neil’s hands above his head again, and they curl automatically in the pillows.

“I didn’t come up here expecting this,” Neil tries to say. Andrew can’t stop staring at the way he looks beneath him, hair feathered out on the dark green sheets, loose shirt, scarred clavicle, glinting piercings, slim waist.

Andrew clicks his tongue reprovingly. “Liar,” he says. He thumbs Neil’s chest, putting his hands all over the span of his ribcage.

Neil looks embarrassed and amused at once. “I’m just trying to take advantage of our free time.”

Andrew accepts this, suddenly conscious of how little time they might have on this weird, close-quarters vacation. This surreal space that they keep returning to, where Neil wants to be kissed by him, can’t possibly be sustainable.

He brushes his mouth over Neil’s ear, and his neck, and gets pulled down into his gravity, past his event horizon, feeling wretched intrigue and death close around him at the same time, feeling a joy so hot that it is also agony, and kissing him, through it all.

He sweeps his tongue over a laser-thin scar, and Neil takes in a fast, hitching breath. His hands stay fixed in the pillowcase, even when they’ve been making out for a long time, and Andrew pulls his legs up around his hips. He doesn’t try to touch him, but he latches on when Andrew drags his hands down and puts them in his hair.

When he remembers to open his eyes, his vision seems vague and secondary. He’s so caught up in the heat of Neil’s mouth, and the thumbs slipping down behind his ears. 

It’s hard to believe that they’re in the same still, chilly room that he woke up in. It’s hard to believe that the wicked thief’s smile at the back of a concert venue all those months ago is something he’s tasted now.

“Neil?” someone calls from below them. Andrew pulls back, and the humming noise that Neil was making into his mouth sort of pops open. “Hey, Neil? Are you around?” It’s Renee’s voice, he can tell now, more tentative than usual. “Nicky’s trying to rope us into playing Rock Band. Do you want to come be on our team?”

“No,” Neil says quietly, to Andrew. Then, consideringly, “Rock Band?”

Andrew sits back on his heels, and Neil’s hands drop from his neck. “Video game.”

“Andrew?” Renee wonders through the floorboards. “Is he up there with you?”

Below him, Neil shakes his head.

“Yes.” He looks down at Neil’s perturbed expression. “He’ll play.”

“Great,” she chirps, “You’re welcome to join us too, if you want.” There’s a short pause as she waits for a response, and then her footsteps fade down the hallway.

Neil sits up so they’re face to face, and Andrew has to grip his shoulders to stay upright. “I don’t want to play. I’m  _in_  a rock band.”

“Consider it practice.” He climbs backwards off of his lap and out of bed, feeling too warm and worked up.

Neil recognizes that he’s being dismissed, and takes it in stride. He gets up off the bed and makes for the hatch down to the main floor. “Can I be the drummer?”

“If you want to lose.”

“I want to know what it feels like to set the pace.”

He scans Neil’s face, and determines that he doesn’t know how flirtatious he sounds, actually, at all.

“No one is stopping you.”

Neil smiles over his shoulder, a flash of teeth before he starts climbing down the stairs, and Andrew thinks maybe he’s underestimated him again.

______

He should be taking Neil to the lake. It’s where the others are gathered, somewhere along the sandbars that border miles upon miles of fresh water. The feedback loop of lake, rivers, and falls means that everything’s always moving, at least a little. Neil should be there.

Only he doesn't like water. He remembers an argument they had, what feels like a lifetime ago, when Neil had said that Andrew “didn’t know what drowning felt like”, and he wonders how literally he meant it.

It’s sinking into the ripest part of evening now, the showing up with wine part of the party before the stumbling out onto the grass with your shoes in your hand part. They’ll all be sharing drinks around the fire by now, playing tinny music without any bass, and rallying around the betting pool that they think he doesn’t know about.

Andrew and Neil don’t make it past the driveway before Andrew grabs Neil’s hand from the gearshift and urges him to park.

“We’re not going to their fire.”

“We’re not,” Neil says haltingly.

“No,” Andrew says. “We’re hungry.”

“We are,” Neil echoes, amused now.

“And they are overly invested in what we do.”

Neil’s hand slips through Andrew’s grasp so he can shift back into reverse. “There’s a we?”

“Only in the grammatical sense,” Andrew says, trying to flatten the colour out of his voice. He used to snap his fingers and turn hope into resentment. He used to have a dentist-grade numbing agent welling up in him always, but he’s starting to feel pins and needles in his lips.

Neil maneuvers deftly out of the winding driveway and onto the main drag. “So where are we going?”

“I don’t know,” Andrew says. He wants to laugh. “Forward.”

______

They drive aimlessly for a while. Neil tries tactlessly to question him about his and Aaron’s relationship, deflecting slightly more gracefully when Andrew tells him about Betsy and her occasional house-calls. It’s interesting, watching Neil do this waltz around things he wants Andrew to talk about and things he doesn’t want to say himself.

He watches his face streak with colour and thought from the buttery darkness of the passenger seat. Sometimes his eyes are on the road but sometimes they’re fully on Andrew, and his mouth is parted even when he’s not speaking. Andrew answers questions when he’s asked, then tries to remember the last time he did that.

They share a joint, rolling the windows partway down so the smoke is spirited away on the breeze. Neil gets so talkative when he’s buzzed. He tells Andrew innocuous stories from his life before, of thieving and pursuit, the tragedies that could almost be comedies, if you tell them right.

Eventually, they end up at this upscale Italian place, with a fully stocked bar and the option between high-walled booths or breakable looking tables and chairs. Andrew’s already stolen breadsticks from someone’s table before the maitre’d can greet them, and he doesn’t even try to hide it. He takes a bite of one, dusty with bread flour and hot from the oven, and Neil’s mouth twitches as he follows him.

The staff have started to take notice, and Neil walks backwards to address them, his face going elastic and non-threatening. “We’re just meeting friends. They should be back here somewhere,” he says. He winks at Andrew, and a second later, impossibly, he stumbles over a bar-stool and knocks over a full shaker that’s just been set on the counter. Ice and booze go sprawling.

“Oh, shit, I’m so sorry,” he says, leaning over and into the mess, grabbing napkins and getting grabbed by the bartender’s panicked hands.

Andrew slips in behind them like he’s overseeing the clean-up, and while he’s there he swipes the tequila that was just taken off the wall for the spilled cocktail. He puts it under his shirt while he’s still craned over, and Neil’s tilts his head at him from over the bartender’s head, his humiliated expression turning ironic.

“Sorry again, man,” Neil says, backing off, hands up.

“Whatever,” the bartender says, chucking ice into the sink so aggressively that some of it bounces back out again.

Neil ushers Andrew to keep moving through the restaurant. “We’ll leave you to it,” Neil calls, and then makes a beeline for the far end of the room. Andrew spots the bathroom sign and jogs after him, tequila bouncing under his shirt, cold and obvious if anyone could see him past the erratic figure Neil’s cutting.

“After you,” Neil says quietly, and Andrew slips past him. It’s an empty little two-stall with black faux-marble walls and a trough-style sink that Neil rolls his eyes at. He leans over and locks the door behind them. “You spill any?”

Andrew produces the tequila, intact. Neil watches the motion with interest. “Good.”

Andrew unscrews the bottle pourer from the top and drops it in the sink. “Couldn’t get to anything else. I didn’t know how long you could sustain such a bad ruse.”

Neil can’t seem to help smiling as he digs a salt shaker out of his front jeans pocket. “Not that bad, I guess.”

“What, no lime?”

“I can’t make it that easy for you.”

“Come here,” Andrew says. Neil does, instantly, looking flushed high on his cheekbones from their spur of the moment heist.

Andrew takes the shaker, licks the outside of his thumb, and pours a stripe of salt up to his wrist. He fights off a shiver as he watches Neil go through the same motions.

They hold the bottle between their chests, Neil’s hand slipping down to the base, their wet fingers catching together.

“How sober are you?” he demands.

“I’m fine,” Neil says. “It was half a joint.”

He checks his eyes, his steady hands. “Yes or no?”

Neil tilts his head. “Yes. Why?”

Andrew takes the first sip, salt then tequila, and Neil follows right after, trying to time it like a shot. As soon as he’s grimaced through a swallow, Andrew kisses him all the way into the mirror. They sway and overcorrect with the movement, clattering into a paper towel dispenser. Still, Andrew can feel his own brow furrowing with how good it is, better every time.

He presses him back over the sink, fingers laced up in his belt loops, then his shirt, then his hair. He wants him so badly that it’s getting in the way of having him. It’s debilitating, the thought that he might glut himself on this feeling and never taste a thing.

Neil’s still holding the bottle between them, and it reminds Andrew to pull back and take another swig, to lose himself in something else instead. Neil’s head thunks back against the mirror.

“Okay,” he breathes.

“Better chase than tap water,” Andrew says hoarsely.

“Uh-huh,” Neil says.

They share half a bottle like this, drinking deep then kissing deep, getting hands under each other’s collars, steaming up the mirror. A couple of times, the door handle rattles until whoever’s outside gives up and retreats.

Eventually, Neil breaks away, sort of shaky. “What are we  _doing?_ ” he breathes. Their foreheads are pressed together, and his breath ghosts over Andrew’s cheek.

There’s a sharp knock on the door before either of them can say anything else.

“Um, sirs? Only paying customers are allowed to use the restroom.”

They look steadily at each other, strange and sober in the face of crisis, rumpled and spilled on and warm from each other’s bodies.

“I’m the only one in here,” Neil tries to say. “And I’m meeting a friend outside.”

“I… don’t think that’s true,” says the voice. They sound young, probably an underpaid server sent to collect them. “The host said she saw two of you come in here.”

Andrew gestures for the window at the far end of the room, and Neil smiles slowly.

“Alright, fine, we’ll get a table, if you insist,” Neil says, half laughing at himself, at the entire absurdity of the situation. Andrew crouches on one knee, arranging himself into a stepping stool.

“It’s uh. A little late for that.”

“Sure, of course,” Neil says, climbing up on Andrew’s thigh and reaching up to fiddle with the window latch. Andrew holds his ankles to steady him. The window stays stubbornly fixed. “Give us a moment.”

Another voice says, “Any longer and we’ll be forced to contact the authorities.”

“Let’s not be hasty,” Andrew says.

“Yeah, let’s not—“ Neil cracks up again, and his face falls to his forearm, briefly. Andrew’s never seen him like this, so relaxed and stupid. Andrew flicks him in the calf, and Neil redoubles his efforts, cranking the lock in either direction before it finally wiggles loose, and he can wind it all the way open.

“Okay, okay,” he mutters, hoisting himself up. Andrew stands as soon as he’s got a grip, and boosts him by the legs.

“We’re going to have to come in, boys,” the second voice says.

“You probably don’t want to do that,” Neil says, voice tight with the effort of squeezing outside. He reaches for Andrew’s hand and pulls. His feet scrabble against the slippery tiled wall. He decides that the tequila is dead weight and drops it on the floor. The bottle shatters and becomes a trap between them and the door just as a key scrapes in the lock.

Andrew manages to get his chest out onto the grass when the door opens and a swell of commotion is let inside. Neil drags him fiercely by both arms, and the rest of him pops through before they can get anywhere near him. Neil gets an arm around him, and they stumble upright as shouts start to echo out of the bathroom and into the chirping night.

“Run,” Neil hisses, and they let go of each other so that they can go running out into the parking lot. They’re both breathing hard, shoulder to shoulder, parting and converging around parked cars. They pass their own van and keep running, beyond the entire lot, out towards the woods that tuck in around all of the buildings and restaurants like the comforter beneath a child’s lego city.

Eventually, Neil’s speed outstrips Andrew’s, and he disappears between the branches. Andrew decides that there’s no imminent danger, and he slows to a jog.

“We didn’t even get to eat,” Neil’s voice pants. He’s somewhere ahead of him, just out of reach.

Andrew searches for him in the low light. “So we’ll go somewhere else.”

He finally makes out Neil’s silhouette, draped against a broad tree. He walks towards him, magnetized as always. “How do you know they haven’t put an APB out by now?”

“It wasn’t a very high stakes crime,” Andrew says slowly, like he’s bored. He isn’t.

“Mm. Maybe we should try harder.”

“Adrenaline junkie,” Andrew accuses. “How can you spend a life in hiding when you’re obsessed with being noticed?”

“I don’t think I was obsessed with being noticed before I met you,” Neil says. Andrew can’t really see him, but he’s speaking like the first warmth you feel in the cold water from the tap.

Andrew’s shoulders stiffen. “Don’t say that.”

“Okay,” Neil agrees easily. “I won’t.”

“I’m not your reason,” he says clearly. “You’re not mine.”

Neil eyes him, vague, through the trees. “Don’t worry. I know where we stand.”

Andrew wants to ask, _really?_  He has no idea where they stand or why they’re standing together or how it’s possible that they’re standing at all when Andrew wants him like this, like a virus wants a host. He wants him even in the middle of a lie, wants to look up and see him draped out of a window, both hands outstretched.

“I wouldn’t have started this with you if I thought it would make things harder,” Neil says, ducking under a branch.

Good. That would be good, and straight-forward, if it were at all true, and if either of them felt it even a little bit.

He follows him through a sheet of budding leaves and into the kind of dry patch where fires start. “All you  _do_  is make things harder.”

There’s a silence, and then he says, “I used to hear that all the time, when I was younger.” His voice is so soft, almost transparent, in the dark.

Andrew’s stomach crumples up. “Yeah. Me too.” He leans against a neighbouring tree, and pulls out two cigarettes. “You can’t manipulate stone. And that frustrated them.” He puts them both in his mouth and lights them at once, then passes one to Neil. He doesn’t bother to explain himself.

Neil accepts it. “You weren’t always—stone, though, right?”

He shrugs. “I never did what people told me to without a good reason. You should understand that.”

Neil inhales deep, and shakes his head. He exhales, and Andrew can taste the tobacco even without taking a drag of his own. “I was plenty manipulated.”

“Your mother?” he wonders aloud.

Neil opens his mouth and closes it again. He takes another drag, and smoke comes pouring out when he finally says: “My father.”

“He’s the one you ran away from,” Andrew guesses. He’d said it with such dread that it’s not really much of a guess.

“He’s the one.” Neil’s eyes don’t seem to be looking at anything at all. “It’s terrible,” he starts, hushed, “but if he were here now, I know I’d do anything he asked.”

“No you wouldn’t,” Andrew says, smoking viciously. “I would kill him first.”

Neil smiles, generous and disbelieving. “He’s not an easy man to kill.”

“Someone managed it,” he says, shrugging. 

Neil’s smile melts smaller and smaller, until it is memory only, the wet smear left behind from a snowflake. “I’m named after him.”

“Abram?”

“Nathan,” Neil says, and it’s as if he spoke it into a meat grinder, and it came out raw and crumbled. Even more quietly, he whispers, “Nathaniel.”

“Neil,” Andrew says, just to replace the sound of it in the air. “He might have had control over Nathaniel, but he can’t get his hands on Neil.”

“No,” he says, seeming strangely unconvinced.  His eyes find Andrew’s properly. “I guess he can’t.”

They end up winding around the whole lot to get back to the car. The night is thick and navy now, and they wear it like a cape and mask, hiding from everyone including each other. Their last conversation sticks in his chest. He can’t shake the feeling of it.

They stay silent all the way to the van, but then Neil puts his feet up on the dashboard, slouching low in the seat, still holding the tiny butt of his cigarette. He blows smoke up into Andrew’s face, and Andrew tweaks it out of his hand.

“Do we go back, now?” Neil asks.

Andrew tries to look out the window, but the foggy interior light is making it so much easier to look at Neil, a low-res sepia dream. “Eventually,” he says.

“I’m still starving,” Neil tells him.

“Good.” Andrew revs the engine. “What do you want to steal next?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> your feedback is staggering and beautiful!!! I am an ocean of gratitude!! here are several thousand words of feelings only!!!!!


	9. Chapter 9

7.

Andrew hands Neil his t-shirt. It’s Saturday, and they’re in Neil’s room, shoulder to shoulder, moonlight quivering above them like a ladle-full of mercury.

“Walk me through it again.”

“Walk yourself through it,” Andrew says. “It’s not that complicated.”

Neil holds the shirt in a ball against his bare chest. “Closed venue. Metal detectors. Sixteen songs. Quick encore.”

“Riko’s not coming.”

Neil swallows, thinking of the number seven in bold, underlined. “He might.”

“I told you to stop believing everything he says he’s capable of,” Andrew says. Neil strums his fingers on the messy wad of his shirt. “He threatens ten people before breakfast. He doesn’t realize how defended you are.”

Neil turns his face into the pillow and screws his eyes shut. “It’s not really about  _him_. It’s just—I don’t know. I trust my instincts.” He doesn't mention the final numbers in a drawn out countdown. He doesn’t rehash the details of Riko’s threat. It won’t change anything.

Andrew shifts and splays his hand over Neil’s jaw. “Don’t,” he says. “They lie.” He scrapes his teeth over Neil’s neck. His half-hour old yes hangs in every corner of the room like smoke. They’re so close, he feels like a shadow being painstakingly gathered up and rolled on.

He licks his lips so close to Neil that his tongue flickers against his skin, and his pulse reacts to the feeling, thunderously fast. He feels the brief pressure of Andrew’s hand on his wrists, and he makes himself go boneless beneath him.

Every time they do this, Neil replays everything a moment after it happens, stockpiling the taste of the frantic breath trapped between them, the hot, calloused hands up under his clothes. His mouth is perpetually gasping open, Andrew’s wet hair choked in his fists. He never used to want anything like this, so badly it could kill him. It could really kill him.

“Neil,” Andrew says. Neil chases his mouth, but Andrew sits up over him, slouched against his hip. “Don’t do this if you think it’s your only option.”  
  
“What do you mean?” Neil breathes.

“I don’t need this,” Andrew says, holding a hand down hard on Neil’s chest. “Neither should you.”

 _Of course I need it_ , Neil wants to say.  _I kiss you and I feel — the way music feels before it leaves my mouth. When it could be anything._

“I just want to,” Neil says, shrugging. Just. Like there’s something nonchalant about admitting it, like it’s nothing to him. He waits for Andrew to call his bluff.

He doesn’t. He just looks down at him, slides his index and middle fingers over Neil’s hipbone, and kisses his chest.

 _Oh no_ , Neil thinks.  _We’ve been so stupid._

6.

His hands make the shapes of the chords, but he can’t seem to play them. His vision swims white.

He can hear what his part should sound like, the dark wind chime cacophony, big-band style backgrounds underneath the grind of furious twin guitars. He should be the food colouring bleeding into their batter.

“Play,” Kevin says bluntly. “This isn’t a read inside your head kind of deal.”

“Yeah,” Nicky says. “Share with the class.”

“One second,” Neil mutters.

“I’m serious, get out of your head,” Kevin says.

“Give me a fucking second,” he snaps. There’s a cool moment of silence.

“We’re never going to be ready for Saturday,” Aaron says, ducking out from under the strap of his guitar.

Neil’s ears burn. He plays some simple inversions so it seems like there’s something musical going on behind his eyes other than alarm bells.

“The rest of us are going to play,” Kevin says. “Catch up.” He slides his fingers down the neck of his bass like he’s slitting a throat. Andrew launches himself at the drum-kit, and Neil blinks at the time signature on his music, the little 6 stacked over the 8.

One, two, three, four, five, six. Play. Play. Play.

He plays a natural A instead of a flat, and the structural integrity of his first chord crumples. He blinks, disbelieving, at his hand, hunched over the botched note. He straightens all of his fingers. The song gallops on without him.

“Are you okay?” Nicky mouths. Neil frowns. His head is full of numbers.

It turns out the song isn’t very good without vocals or keys. Kevin is obviously aware of it, and his face is sour, clenched like a fist. Neil watches his pursed mouth, then Nicky’s concerned brown peach-pit eyes, and Andrew and Aaron’s uncannily synced expressions of disdain.

“I’m sorry,” he says, before the last note has completely died.

“Useless. That’s utterly useless to me,” Kevin says.

“I’m distracted.”

“Obviously,” Kevin says tightly. “Let’s go again.” They play for a minute. Andrew puts his sticks down suddenly, and the tempo trips over its own feet. He stands up amid the clatter of directionless instruments. “Jesus Andrew, fucking participate.”

He sidles out from behind the drums and walks wordlessly out of the room. Neil immediately gets up to follow, but Kevin catches his arm.

“This _distraction_ , Neil, it’s poison. If you let it progress I will never forgive you.”

“You don’t have to worry about anything progressing,” he tells him.

Kevin’s grip loosens. “This isn’t a joke to me,” he says quietly.

“I guarantee you I don’t find anything about you funny.”

Kevin sighs and looks at the ceiling. “Okay.”

“Five minutes,” Neil says. He shakes Kevin loose and stalks out of the room, feeling a little shock of adrenaline lifting his feet.

Andrew’s waiting for him around the corner.

“Don’t be an idiot.”

“Okay,” Neil says.

“You’re not careless like this. Not about music.”

“Don’t worry, it’s not about this,” Neil says, gesturing between them.

Andrew narrows his eyes. “Riko’s not going to hire a hit on you at a public gig, and the more you obsess about it the more I think you might actually be clueless.”

“You don’t already think that?” Neil asks, surprised.

Andrew ignores him. “If you’re so afraid of losing your voice, then why are you going silent now?”

“It’s not just about my voice anymore. It’s about all of us. You—“ He searches Andrew’s face. “You must know that.”

“I try to know as little about you as possible.”

“Right.”

“Right.”

He watches Andrew’s tightly closed expression and wants so badly to screw it open.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Andrew says.

“Just—distract me?” Neil begs.

Andrew considers. “From what?”

He steps closer. Andrew lets him. He doesn’t bend backwards in Neil’s blustering, wanting wind.

“From him.” He doesn’t say Kevin and his prying, or Riko’s posturing, or his father’s oppressive memory, but Andrew seems to understand.

He understands all the way into Neil’s space, and then he understands his mouth open and his thighs apart, and he gives him something to press down into, when the piano keys wouldn’t budge.

They sway. Music trickles through the halls from somewhere. Maybe out of Neil’s mouth.

“Oh,” someone says.

The interruption is a lightning strike, and it splits them in half. Andrew uses Neil’s chest as leverage to push himself backwards several feet. He’s overcorrecting, trying to close off his expression and hold his breath, wrenching a door closed over the vulnerability of being seen wanting something.

Neil sucks his bottom lip into his mouth, and tries to get his equilibrium back, shifting from being deeply kissed to being shoved halfway across the hall.

“Oh,” Nicky repeats. “Oh, fuck, um. Sorry. We’re just—starting.” He holds a hand to his face, half laughing. “Oh my god.”

Andrew wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and Neil and Nicky watch him breeze past them both.

“What the fuck, actually,” Nicky hisses. Neil shakes his head, speechless. “You’re— no, I can’t even talk about this.”

“Good,” Neil manages.

“Actually, wait, I definitely can,” Nicky says. “That’s my—Neil, you know that was Andrew, right? My cousin Andrew?”

Neil bristles. “Unlike you, I do actually try to identify a person before I kiss them.”

Nicky ignores this dig, and says, “so that  _is_  what you were doing? I didn’t hallucinate that?”

Neil gives him a look, and tries to walk back to the recording studio, but Nicky catches him by both elbows.

“No, no, no, no, I’m nowhere near done with this, oh my god.”

“I am.”

“Neil,” Nicky moans.

“Practice, now,” Neil says, dragging him back with him.

“Then talk later, please, Neil, take pity on me.”

He ignores him, and everyone else, until he’s behind the piano.

He starts playing the sequence, pitch perfect this time, and one by one, the ensemble climbs in behind him. 

If he doesn’t look up at them, it’s like nothing even happened. Andrew’s drums are full of space and Nicky’s guitar is urgent where Aaron’s is steady. Kevin’s bass is thick and sweet as syrup, and suddenly they’re good again.

In the shuffle of coming and going, he had completely forgotten to count himself in.

5.

Before Monday can start, Neil tries to stop time.

He wanders the house in the twilight, hoping that the silence will somehow keep him preserved in place.

The oven clock blinks 5:00 am for what seems like a very long time. The humidifier in Kevin’s room makes a noise like wheels on asphalt, that silky, endless grind.

As always, Neil doesn’t have a destination. He pauses drowsily at the kitchen window and looks at the grey stucco of the house next door. He goes downstairs, pauses on the second to last stair, then walks back up again. He sits on the porch steps for a while, but it feels so exposed that he panics, fumbling loudly with the screen door on his way back inside.

He almost cries in the bathroom mirror, and then he pinches his fingers over his eyes until it hurts.

He nudges the door to Andrew’s bedroom open, but he’s soundly asleep for once, and it makes him want to cry again, to think of waking him. He eases the door closed.

“Hey,” Nicky says gently. Neil looks up, hand still curled around Andrew’s doorknob.

“What do you want?” he whispers.

Nicky looks sad. “Just checking on you. I heard you moving around up here.”

“How did you know it was me?”

Nicky smiles, crossing his arms and leaning sleepily up against the wall. “I listen pretty good, you know? It’s what makes me so invaluable.”

“Right,” Neil says. Then stronger, meaning it, “right.” He swallows. “Look, Nicky, I don’t really want to talk about—“

“It’s fine,” Nicky says, waving him off. He grins. “You’ll tell me everything eventually. They always do.”

 _Eventually_. Neil tries to smile, or roll his eyes, or get angry, but he feels like he can’t move. If Nicky isn’t actively telling a joke he always looks like he’s about to, or like maybe he just did and you didn’t get it. It feels incongruous and cruel to do anything but laugh. 

“Come sit with me,” Nicky says, nodding towards the living room. “We’ve got time.”

Neil peers around the dividing wall into the kitchen as they pass. 5:15, the oven reports. They settle into their usual spots on the couch and love seat, predictable as ghosts. Cold air presses in through the cracked window and makes the old leather crunch when he moves.

“Are you nervous?”

Neil looks back at him, distracted. “About what?”

“Saturday.”

Neil’s heart jerks, confused, before he remembers the concert. He feels like he’s been staring so hard at the details of the frame that he forgot the painting inside it.

“I don’t really get stage fright,” Neil says honestly.

“I know,” Nicky says. He’s smiling wryly, chin propped up on his knee. “You’re fearless. It’s obnoxious.”

“I’m not fearless. I just think it’s a waste of time to worry about the things I actually like to do.”  
  
“Sage wisdom,” Nicky snorts. “Trying to put Betsy out of a job?”

Neil shrugs. “I probably could.”

“Pff,” Nicky says. “I’m not sure you’re well-adjusted enough for that.”

“It’s a pseudo-science anyway,” Neil says.

“Uh-huh,” Nicky says, amused. His smile sags a little, and he looks away. “Um. I know I wasn’t going to make you talk about it, but—“

“Nicky,” Neil warns. “You didn’t even last five minutes.”

“I know, I know, I’m a gossip, whatever. Just tell me you’re not jerking him around, okay? Tell me it’s serious. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I pretty much raised that rascal.”

“It’s not serious,” Neil says, confused. “It’s not really anything. It’s just—a distraction. For both of us.”

“Neil, come on.”

“What?”

Nicky’s looking at him with wide-open disbelief, and Neil’s skin crawls.

“It’s obviously something.”

“It’s not,” Neil argues. He thinks of Andrew, hot against him, saying  _I don’t need this, neither should you_. “I know exactly where we stand.”

“Really, because it seems like maybe you don’t, at all. There’s no fucking way this means nothing to him. I think there’s been something about you from the very beginning. He only writes lyrics about shit that’s like, in his  _bloodstream_ —“

Neil shivers, annoyed. “We don’t have feelings for each other just because you want us to. We have a deal. He’s counting on me not to get attached.”

Nicky studies him appraisingly. “Did he tell you that?”

“Yes,” Neil says, trying not to dwell on it. “That’s what I’ve been saying.”

“Okay, fine,” Nicky says. “Believe what you want.” He pushes himself to the edge of the couch, and reaches out to pat Neil’s cheek. “Just be careful with each other, okay?”

“Andrew doesn’t need to be coddled.”

Nicky smiles, sideways. “Sure he does.” He stands, steadying himself on Neil’s shoulder. “We all deserve a little coddling, I think. Why not? It’s better than getting hurt for no reason.” He rounds the couch and makes his way over to the stairs to the basement. “I’ll try not to bring it up again unless you fuck up in a big way, okay?”

“Okay,” Neil agrees, relieved.  

Nicky smiles. “Go back to sleep.” He nods back to the place where he found Neil skulking in the hall. “Believe me, waking Andrew up is more trouble than it’s worth.”

Neil shrugs. “I’ve done it before.”

Nicky wrinkles his nose a little, and scoffs, “I bet you have.” He doesn’t elaborate, and Neil narrows his eyes at him until he slinks back down the stairs towards his room.

He knows Nicky is wrong about this. Andrew agreed to stop writing about him, and Neil agreed to stop pinning his hopes on him in return. He would know, if Andrew wanted more from him. He thinks—no, he would know.

He sits in the chilly little sitting room, listening to that grumbling humidifier and watching the dark TV screen reflect the outside lights. Every corner of this place is familiar. It hurts to think of how much time he’s spent here, letting himself in, drinking and singing and kissing Andrew’s tired morning mouth. 5:30, the oven clock whispers.

He puts his hand to a crease in the couch, and thinks, hopeless,  _I want to stay_.

4.

Some nights, Kevin drags him back into the studio after practice. He forces him through vocal gymnastics and ear training until he can sing all of their songs a cappella and unwavering.

Kevin walks him through the empty halls with such purpose, like he’s fighting through a crowd that isn’t there. Neil wonders what it would be like, to have that self-importance baked into you. To feel like you’ve earned it.

He watches the arc of Kevin’s back as he tinkers with wires. As always, in the final days of the countdown, Neil wants absently to be somewhere else. 

Of course he loves these sessions, honing his skill with Kevin, and he enjoys pacing through Palmetto when it’s a perfect empty labyrinth. But he doesn’t want to go through the motions of the same fight, and he doesn’t want to think about what they’re practicing for anymore, a tour that he is unlikely to finish.

He swallows stale bottled water and plonks his phone up on the piano where he won’t be tempted to check it.

“Are we ready?” Kevin asks. Neil shrugs. “Let’s try the harmonies in big blue.” Affectionately nicknamed by Nicky for its bluesy influence, a sound so rich and dark that it’s almost purple.

“Can we workshop the repeat? I’m still not sure what we’re doing with dynamics, there.”

“Not yet,” Kevin sniffs. “We need everyone here for that.”

“But I’m good on everything else,” Neil says.

“I decide when you’re good,” Kevin says, adjusting Neil’s microphone in front of him, like he’s a child who can’t fasten his own bib.

He can’t help it, his fists curl. “Right. Remind me why you get that privilege, again?”

“Neil,” Kevin says. “We don’t have time for this conversation.”

“For once we agree,” Neil says icily.

“I was one half of Evermore, remember? We weren’t the most popular duo in America because we wasted time bickering. We were an organization in every sense of the word. We each had our tasks and we completed them.”

“Do you think that’s what makes a good band?” Neil asks.

Kevin falters. “I—not anymore, no.”

“We’re better than Evermore  _because_  we fight. For everything.”

“We’re not better than Evermore,” Kevin scoffs.

“That depends on how you define better,” Neil says. Kevin looks away. He can’t seem to hold eye contact; his face always splinters under the heft of the other person’s gaze, like thin ice underfoot.

“I try not to think about before.”

“Yeah,” Neil says, feeling his stomach sink. “Yeah, I understand that.”

“I—“ Kevin starts, twisting the plug at the root of his bass, rocking back so he’s sitting on the nearest amp. “I know you’re hiding—something. From us.”

Neil nods. “Okay.”

“And it’s weird because, there’s a lot of shitty stuff about you that you don’t bother to hide.”

Neil snorts, feeling unusually lenient with Kevin, almost enjoying his sharp mouth.

“So I’m kind of thinking… whatever it is must be really bad.”

“Interesting theory.”

“Are you denying it?”

“I can’t be bothered to lie to you, Kevin. Most of what I say goes over your head anyway.”

“Fuck you,” Kevin says, but he’s kind of smiling.

“All you need to know is that I’m committed to Ausreißer. I will be until the very end. Will you keep practicing with me until then?”

“Yeah,” Kevin says, reaching out and knocking awkwardly on top of the piano. “Every night.”

3.

Neil has never had trouble telling the twins apart. The way they hold themselves is entirely different; Aaron’s shoulders are always at a contrary angle while Andrew’s are straight across. Aaron is sour where Andrew is bitter—there’s a crucial difference there. The armbands help, but he likes to think he could tell them apart in a snowstorm, bundled up across the street.

He also has disdain for Aaron where he has respect for Andrew, and he hasn’t teased those feelings completely apart yet.

When he walks out of the record shop on main street and sees Aaron walking with an unfamiliar woman, he stops short. His fingers bunch in the plastic handle of the bag swinging from one hand.

“I thought you had an appointment with Dobson,” he calls. Aaron looks around guiltily, and his arm shrivels away from the woman’s shoulders. “And unless this is her...”

“Neil,” he says stiffly. “This is Katelyn.”

She waves cheerfully. Neil ignores her. “Is there a reason you’re lying to the team?”

Aaron rolls his eyes, and makes a show of relaxing back into Katelyn’s side. “It’s none of your business, at all, as usual.” He tries to steer them past Neil on the sidewalk, but Neil sidesteps back into their way.

“Andrew doesn’t tend to like outsiders.”

“Do you honestly think I’ve forgotten that?” Aaron hisses. He seems embarrassed, and Neil can see his hand consciously gentling on Katelyn’s shoulder. “Can you—“ he looks at her apologetically. “Just give us a second, okay?”

“Of course,” she says sweetly. “Wave me over if you need extraction,” she says, quieter, and he smiles secretly back at her. Neil frowns as Aaron kisses her on the temple, and ushers Neil back under the awning next to the record shop.

“I know what Andrew’s opinions are on this, probably better than you do,” he starts.

“So why are you still doing it?” Neil asks.

“Why are you fucking my brother?” Aaron returns. His irises look exactly like Andrew’s do when he’s frustrated, more like an absence of colour than anything else. Neil shivers, though the noonday heat is still tense in the air.

“How is that relevant?”

“So you are then.”

Neil squints at him. “Just tell me what to think about this so I can stop talking to you.”

“Nice,” Aaron says sarcastically. “Don’t act like you’re above this. You’re breaking the rules just as badly as we are.”

“What rules am I breaking, exactly?”

Aaron looks nervously back at Katelyn. “You should’ve spoken to Andrew about this, not me.”

“Believe me, I would rather be talking to him, but  _you’re_  the one who just showed up here with a secret.”

“Look, just pretend you never saw us. I’ll pretend your obsession with my brother isn’t physically repugnant to me.”

“I don’t have time for pretending,” Neil snaps. A passing bicyclist startles at his raised voice, and one pedal briefly spins out. “I don’t have time for whatever is keeping you and Andrew apart.”

Aaron scrutinizes him for a long moment. There’s something surprisingly sharp about his expression. “Whatever problems we have were here long before you got here, and they’ll be here after you’re gone.”

“You’re right,” Neil says. He can feel the frustration bleeding out from his face, wetting his collar, flooding the street. “What a waste.” 

He tugs his shopping bag up around his wrist like a bracelet and sets off in the opposite direction from the one Aaron had been walking in.

Later, when he’s listening to Ausreißer’s first studio album on a borrowed CD-player, he can’t stop thinking of the family they have so clearly always been.

Their sound was chaotic, angrier than it is with Neil. Andrew’s lyrics are about missing something you’ve never had, and Neil emphatically thinks  _yes_ , without really understanding why it resonates with him.

Nicky and Aaron and Andrew had only found each other six or seven years ago by Neil’s count. They had been slung together with Kevin from circumstances that looked entirely incompatible on paper, but harmonized when they were spoken aloud.

They hurled things at each other like pottery that shattered into colour and powder; they demolished their glass houses and stood hand in hand in the rubble; they flattened all of that gravel into smooth open road.

Neil knows they play better, now that the music is all pointed in the same direction, but there’s something about this snapshot of who they were that’s so compelling. Teenagers who didn’t know they were all feeling the same terrible things. Even though they sing about hollowness and regret, it’s so obvious from the outside that they weren’t alone at all.

Neil clutches the jewel CD case to his chest, lying in the dark, and wonders if the five of them look like that now, always at odds but completely in tune.

2.

They have brunch at the Foxes dorm on Thursday.

Neil has long been charmed by the cream and sunshine corners of their house, the huge monstera plant in the kitchen, the teacups full of wrapped candies on every surface, the orange living room wall with a couple of framed music awards hanging above the couch.

It’s lived-in in a completely different way from the monsters’ strange storm-cloud pocket in suburbia.

Wymack and Abby have been invited to keep the peace. It’s interesting to see the way everyone from Foxes relaxes with them posted at the dining room table, while everyone from Ausreißer get the slightest bit stiffer, possibly out of some warped kind of respect.

Almost nothing happens, all morning. It’s a tableau so appealing that it’s almost ugly. It already feels like a memory.

Neil watches Renee and Nicky setting the table, and Matt threatening teasingly to pour coffee in Kevin’s lap. Wymack’s voice when he calls the rest of them to the table is commanding in a way that startles Neil less than it used to. Dan jumps when Neil does though, and they share a look.

“He has such a dad voice, it’s ridiculous.”

“Yeah,” Neil says, pretending to understand.

“No one even think about leaving this table without a good reason,” Wymack says. “Anyone bringing animosity to breakfast gets a boot in the ass.”

“You promise?” Nicky says.

“Don’t be gross,” Aaron says. Allison laughs. They tuck into french toast and peaches and whipped cream from a can. Matt made the bacon too crispy, and even the smell of it is nauseating.

“Neil, are you freaking out yet?” Matt asks.

“What? Why?” Neil asks. He can feel Andrew peering at the side of his face for a fraction of a moment.

Matt’s smile quirks, turning on its side. “Big concert on Saturday? Live debut of your very own songs? Ringing any bells?”

“A few,” Neil says awkwardly. “I’m in denial.”

“Mm, he is,” Nicky says around a mouthful of fruit. “About so many things.” He’d definitely smoked a little weed bright and early this morning, and it’s made his lips dangerously loose.

Neil glares at him, but Dan’s focus is already cranked in tight. She puts down her knife. “Like?” she asks.

Neil shrugs.

“What, is it a sex thing?” Allison asks.

“Uh-uh,” Wymack says. “Vetoed.”

“You can’t veto conversational topics in our house,” Dan argues.

“I can, I am, change the subject.”

“Boring.”

“How’s the mixing on the collab going?” Kevin asks, reaching across half of the table to get at the orange juice.

“Done,” Matt says proudly. “Chopped and screwed. Signed, sealed, delivered, etc.”

“Collab?” Abby asks, interested.

“Neil’s featuring on a Foxes track,” Renee says, smiling around her napkin.

“We’re set to drop it on Monday,” Allison adds.

He wonders if they’ll still release it, once he’s gone missing. He thinks again of his echo, the proof of his relationships with all of these people, fossilized in mp3 files and kicked around the radio forever.

“That’s exciting,” Abby says. “Kind of outside your rocker comfort zone though, isn’t it Neil?”

“My ‘comfort zone’ is pretty narrow,” Neil says flatly. “But music is music.”

“I suppose so,” she says, smiling sheepishly. “It’s not like you don’t have the voice for it.”

“And anyway, genre’s a beautiful thing,” Dan says twirling a fork full of pineapple in the air. “It’s made to be fucked with.”

Matt raises his glass in mock toast. “Here here.”

“I still haven’t heard this song,” Kevin complains.

“You haven’t earned it,” Allison says.

“Play it for him,” Neil hears himself say. He can’t catch the thought before it flutters out of him. They all look at him. “I want to hear what he thinks,” he admits.

He half looks at Andrew, who is slouched back in his seat, drowning his french toast in syrup and jam. Neil suspects that he’s the sort of person who would put ice cream on breakfast foods.

Neil can see a little moth-eaten hole in the shoulder of his t-shirt. There are mismatched seat cushions tied to the dining room chairs, and Andrew’s is orange and blue gingham.

“Play it, play it,” Nicky says.

“Okay, fine, but only because Neil actually asked,” Dan says.

Allison hums. “Neil’s superpower. Asking nicely.” He looks up at her, but she’s looking past him.

Dan starts to stand, but Renee scoots back from the table and waves her away. “I can pull it up for you,” she says. “I was just playing it while I made breakfast.”

There’s a little set-up in the far corner of the room, a couple of monitors and speakers, a keyboard, a microphone. Renee tugs her skirt primly underneath her and sits in the rolling chair, sliding home at the desk.

Neil watches her click through a few files and toggle the volume controls. The longer it takes her, the more his hands start to shake. He hides them under the tablecloth. Andrew’s knee presses against his, hard.

“Ready?”

Neil almost shakes his head.

“Just don’t offer unsolicited critiques,” Dan says. “It’s a done deal, no more tweaking allowed.”

“Yeah, Kevin,” Matt says pointedly. “If you comment on the timbre or whatever the fuck, you’re uninvited to brunch.”

“Please, he’d love that,” Nicky jokes. “He loves insulting people and hates social obligations.” He scruffs the top of Kevin’s head teasingly but his hand gets slapped away.

“Just hit play,” Wymack commands. Renee does.

The house floods with music.

 

_kidnapped by two pomegranate halves_

_the seeds won’t let me go_

_walked thigh-deep in the ocean_

_I’ve never been this slow_

_I have to die tomorrow_

_but for a minute I could grow_

_here in your garden._

 

_don’t don’t watch me go_

_it’s so much worse if you know_

_I really thought I was home_

_and the lights stay on_

_but there’s no more show_

_and don’t watch me go_

_it stays a yes if I don’t say no_

_it was dangerous to fly so low_

_But worth it not to be alone._

Neil sits through it, embarrassed and relieved at once. It’s like a love letter being passed around the room to be read.

He knows most of them will listen only to the tune at first, the same way he knows that Andrew is memorizing the lyrics as they are sung.

Everyone in Foxes had assumed that he was writing about something that had long since happened, so he managed to dodge their concern. They’d been excited, contributing, unspooling then re-spooling his rhyme scheme so it was tighter, vacuum sealing his ideas to the shapes of the notes.

And the music is exactly right, dark and rolling with the lushness of a thunderstorm. 

Neil and Dan sing together, caught up in these tricky, wonky harmonies that almost grate but resolve sweet—like the burn and flush of hard liquor. Matt, not usually one to sing, is a counterpoint in the bass below them.

The guitar gallops next to the bass, pinched together with layers of electronic effects. Renee’s muted violin comes in halfway through, building up to a crescendo, making everything feel urgent and serious, and then the tension breaks — the instruments all drop out, but Neil is singing so hard that he’s almost shouting, Dan’s voice pinned up underneath him, the rest of them humming, like a machine, or like a mother soothing her child to sleep.

“Oh man,” Nicky whispers.

It’s not pop, but it’s not rock either. It’s an outlier on the album that Foxes put together and it’s meant to be that way, more of a marathon of sounds and feelings than a formulaic piece of music. It’s a risk, they keep telling him. Their audience might not ‘get it’.

He loves it in the particular way that you love the limb that’s about to be amputated. You have it, and you’ve always had it, and you won’t have it again.

Nicky leans over and fishes his hand out from under the table to be held. “You’ve outdone yourself, Neil Josten.”

“I haven’t heard you sing like that,” Kevin admits, nose in his drink to hide the compliment.

“You have,” Neil argues.

“He has,” Aaron agrees, unexpectedly. “You’re just too busy admiring your own playing to notice.”

Nicky squeezes his fingers. “Those lyrics—“

“Okay, give  _us_  compliments now,” Allison says.

“Well it goes without saying,” Nicky starts, but he says it anyway, lauding the production, Allison’s warm alto, Renee’s switch from drums and synth to violin, and the a cappella section in the heart of it all.

Andrew is silent next to Neil, but he is pulling a loose thread from his cloth napkin so it contorts around one tense point.

He’s never heard the conversation get so animated between these two groups, so much so that it kind of doesn’t feel like two separate groups at all.

At some point, Kevin says, “maybe we should all try working on a track, if it gets these kinds of results.”

“Seriously?” Matt asks. 

“I’m not moderating that recording session,” Wymack says, looking exhausted at the thought of it.

“We can all take care of ourselves, it’ll be fine,” Dan says flippantly, and Neil thinks, yeah, of course.

They’ll be fine.

1.

“Are you planning on going somewhere?” Andrew asks.

Neil looks up from his notebook. He’s been sitting at the kitchen table in his sweatpants while the rest of the band flits around the house collecting shoes and jackets and dugouts full of stale weed. The doors keep opening and closing, but he thought they’d finally left for Eden’s Twilight.

Andrew stares him down, backlit from the hall. He has the sudden thought that he can’t remember the last time he saw Andrew have a drink.

“I told you,” Neil says, “I don’t want to go to a club the night before our concert.”

“ _Don’t watch me go_  /  _it’s so much worse if you know,_ ” Andrew recites. “I want to know where you think you’re going.”

Neil’s eyes flit towards the foyer. “Are they just waiting in the car for you?”

“I asked you a question.” His voice is dangerously close to colour.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, or who’s going to come for me, but someone will, and I’m worried that it will end badly for more than just me.”

“Worried enough to write a song about it.”

A moment passes between them in which they both think of what else is important enough to write songs about.

“I never expected to be here forever,” Neil says.

“You should’ve thought of that before you signed with us,” he says. Neil shrugs, miserable. He  _had_  thought about it, and he’d decided they were worth every feverish moment of risk. “I’ve told you I won’t allow the Moriyamas to get to you,” Andrew continues.

“I don’t think you should promise me that.”

“It’s part of the deal.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t have a deal anymore,” Neil says, too loud. Andrew stares at him. “Maybe we should call it off.”

“You’re a special kind of suicidal,” Andrew says. “There’s no reason for you to let them win before they have even come.”

“I need to fight for myself,” Neil admits. “I need you with me, and behind me, but I can’t keep holding you in front of me.” Andrew stands perfectly still, a muscle straining in his jaw. “Let me go.”

“I think you’re making a mistake.”

Neil almost laughs. “For once, I’m not. There are people in my life that I want to protect. So I’m going to do that.”

Andrew steps just barely closer. “You can’t change your mind.”

“I won’t.”

“Okay,” Andrew says simply.

“Thank you,” Neil says, leaning back in his chair, wrung out with relief.

Andrew walks all the way up to him, and Neil’s loose neck tips back to keep him in view.

A hand slips up to hold the back of his head, a tight, familiar grip.

“Don’t make me regret trusting you.”

In a moment of weakness, Neil wets his lips and says, “you trust me?” His heart is so far up his throat that he imagines he can feel his molars digging into it when he talks. His hand finds the bottom of Andrew’s sweater and tangles in the hem.

Andrew winces, spectacularly, an entire chain reaction of eyebrows and lashes and wrinkled nose. He reaches down and pulls his hand away, but it takes him too long to let go of Neil’s flexed fingers.

For days afterwards, Neil will replay this suspended moment, in which they are connected at the hand, and Andrew can’t bring himself to deny that he trusts him.

0.

He gets the last text in the countdown halfway through final rehearsal at the venue, but he doesn’t let himself dwell on it. There’s no follow-up, no phone call, no shadow in the window. He turns his phone off.

The more day that they manage to chew up and put behind them, the more the anticipation turns into confusion, and then droops and dissolves completely. They have a show to put on, and he is tired of being threatened.

They’re playing the same auditorium in Colombia where Neil saw his first Foxes show, the same place where he received the first text in the countdown. Backstage is exactly as he remembers it, cooler and darker than the rest of the building, lined with equipment and snaked with wires. This time though, their custom Ausreißer drum-kit is centre stage, and their set-up is as organized as a well-laid table.

He keeps making grinning eye contact with Nicky and remembering that under any other circumstances, he would be hyper-charged with good adrenaline, a wind-up toy trembling to be let go.

He warms up so thoroughly that he could pour his voice straight through a sieve and nothing would catch.

The sound check is a bit bumpy, and it’s always jarring to be mid-song and get the signal to stop. He never knows how much he should be performing, in practice.

Eventually, the curtain is dropped, and the five of them are corralled into the dressing room at the very end of a ropey backstage hallway. Neil sits cross-legged on a worn leather couch and lets Nicky apply make-up to his face. He often did his own before he joined the band, when he was concerned with sculpting his face and covering scars, but Nicky’s toolkit is entirely different — eyeliner and smoke.

Kevin shrugs on his custom jacket, fitted, leather. He’s warming up under his breath, always. Aaron’s been ready since lunch, and he sits with his combat boots dangling over the arm of a chair and a book balanced on his knees. Neil’s watching though, and he can see Aaron running through fingerings with his left hand. Andrew isn’t in the room, which means he’s smoking somewhere.

They’ve done so many shows, but it feels like a different art now, somehow. He thinks of the words that Andrew has written for him, the chord progressions that Kevin fed him every night until he spoke in notes instead of words. He thinks of the moment before you perform, when the crowd is a runway and you are a plane.

For the first time all week, he wants time to move faster.

______

The show grins and spits in the crowd’s faces.

It’s filthy and fast-paced and polished, and the sound and energy could prop Neil up even if his body gave out.

They’re sold out, and the audience never stops arcing up to try and touch them; all he can see is a forest of arms forever and ever.

He loses his mind a little bit, somewhere between their opener and their eighth song. His hair works itself out of the stubby little ponytail that he’s knotted it into, and his eyeliner melts off under the stage lights. Kevin does some improv so excellent that Neil holds his microphone up to the bass, and feedback screams like a sixth band member. Andrew hammers the snares so hard at the end of their third song that the momentum forces him up out of his seat.

They take a mid-show break, and a nervous employee tells them that the crowd is getting out of hand. Nicky replies that they’ve obviously never been to an Ausreißer show before. Kevin tells them to call in more security. Neil thinks, how did he ever think that Riko could get him here, through this thicket of fans?

The second half of their set is somehow even rowdier; songs devolve into sheer noise, and Neil has to grab at his ear piece and concentrate to stay on pitch. They’ve organized posters and chants, and action ripples constantly through the venue.

His anxiety spikes, somewhere under the thrill of performing. He looks back from the keyboard towards Andrew, who raises his chin at him. There’s a noise like something shattering, at the back of the hall. Something feels wrong.

Nicky’s laughing, unaware, spritzing a beer into the audience, and Aaron is playing fuller chords to make up for his absence. Kevin takes the melody in this one, and he’s holding the mic tenderly with both hands.

Finally, they play the song Neil wrote, and he’s half in and half out of the euphoria of it. He’s coasting from uneasy to sickly, but it’s the biggest crowd they’ve ever played, and the music is snapping together so perfectly. It might be better than their studio version. It’s the most frightening thing he’s ever done.

They careen through their final songs, to raucous applause.

Backstage is an ice-cold haven, and Neil droops gratefully into its open arms, accepting a water bottle and holding the back of his hand to his feverish forehead.

He blinks hard in the new darkness, listening, detached, to their fans begging for an encore.

They’re in a loose circle, debauched and exhausted. There’s no point in trying to talk through the noise, so they breathe together, and nod, and gather themselves back up.

Four fifths of them are back on stage in a riptide of joy that sounds painful, when a stage-hand gestures violently for Neil’s attention.

He jogs up and hands him an open flip phone. Neil looks down at it, then back into the person’s nervous face.

“It’s for you,” they mouth.

A shiver rakes viciously down his back. He takes the phone in one frozen hand.

There’s a text that reads:

_Come find me in your dressing room, Junior._

And then,

_You really should have answered my calls. Too late now._

He can’t see. His whole world falls on its side. He drops the phone. He can’t hear the noise it should make when it connects with the floor, like maybe physics isn’t working, and he thinks-- _I’m dreaming._

He manages to look out at the stage, where it feels like everyone in the world is looking expectantly at him. He looks back towards their dressing room.

For a moment, it’s hilarious. He was safe and invisible, and then he clambered up on stage and sang himself raw for  _months_. He was constantly recorded, and photographed, and trackable. 

He wonders if he could’ve even performed like he does, without the fear at his back, if part of him was using the band as another means of running away. He wonders why they let him live this long, what kind of mercy could possibly live inside his father.

He walks unsteadily towards the dressing room, ears ringing. His legs don’t belong to him. He tells the stage-hand—something. To vamp, or excuse him. He doesn’t even know.

He’s been pacing this hallway all day, he knows it creaks and moves with you, but the sound is all swallowed now.

He wrings the doorknob, and presses inward, expecting the barrel of a gun, expecting some impossible amalgamation of Riko and Nathan and all of their muscle combined.

The dressing room looks the same way they left it.

He scans the table full of their belongings, and the wall of mirrors. His breath is so loud in the stillness of the room. He thinks wildly that it was all a cruel prank, or a misunderstanding. 

And then he sees her grinning, cheshire reflection in the dark. He whips around.

“Lola,” he chokes.

“Oh, good. You do remember me,” she says. There’s a gun in her hand with a silencer screwed into the barrel, and she’s holding it casually at attention, the same way one might hold a lazy cigarette.

“You can’t be here,” he says.

“I very nearly wasn’t,” she says. “I didn’t have a backstage pass. I can’t decide if you’re an idiot, for choosing to stand directly in the public eye, or if you were counting on your position affording you extra… protection.” She shifts, and Neil can see now that there’s a corpse at her feet. She nudges it with her shoe. “Anyone you know?”

He nearly throws up. His body roils with terror and fury, and his voice is thick when he says, “you’d better hope not, for your sake.”

She laughs, delighted. “Have you decided to fight back? Your father will be so pleased.” She stands up. “Hate to cut this short, but we’ve got places to be, rockstar.”

He shakes his head. “You can’t possibly think that you can get me out of here that easily. My band is literally waiting on stage for me.”

“That’s why you’re going to finish your little set, and then you’re going to come find me in the parking lot. Oh, and this guard was a dud,” she says, nodding at the crumpled body that Neil can see now is one of the hired security guards who had been controlling the crowd. “So I hired you some specialists.”

He shakes his head again, thoughts racing. “They won’t just let me go.”

“I think they will, with some persuading,” she says.

“Don’t touch them.”

Lola wiggles the gun teasingly against his chin. “Don’t make me.” She moves past him, trailing her nails along his shoulder as she goes. When she opens the door, he can see the looming figures of Jackson Plank and Romero Malcolm, decked out in all black. The thrill of music and cheering bursts back into his ears. He’d almost forgotten where he was.

Lola tucks her hair behind her ear and her gun into her waistband. She smiles at him, and he has the sick feeling that the whole time he’d been thinking of the daily texts as the dwindling digits on a time bomb, Lola had been relishing in every number.

“See you soon, Junior.”

**Author's Note:**

> yooo this story is one of many from my tumblr ravenvsfox, I'm pulling up my socks and writing in like..... a good format lmao
> 
> I borrowed the title from the Jacob Banks song, which I found bc of aymmidumps' excellent art, DEF check them out if you haven't already, they did a [piece](http://aymmidumps.tumblr.com/post/177004768137/some-fanart-for-this-glorious-fic-that-handed-me) for this fic!!! 
> 
> If you drop me a kudos or comment or quote me @ me I'll really truly cry


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